The primary reference point in McQueen's back catalogue may, in fact, be less Occupied City than 2020's Small Axe: large-scale period drama, made with TV money and an unsparingly critical eye. Blitz unfolds on an even grander scale (the film's panoramic cityscapes have visibly been constructed with streaming TV money rather than terrestrial), yet there's been no let up in authorial rigour and scrutiny. Adam Stockhausen's production design is all the more impressive for having to exist in two states - intact, and in rubble - and this may well stand as the best cast film of 2024, every scene finding faces that present as exact matches for period and part. (Casting director Nina Gold does some of her best work in and around the armaments factory where Ronan the riveter plies her trade: Hayley Squires and Erin Kellyman as fellow workers, Joshua McGuire's foreman exuding bumptious authority beneath a pencil moustache.) With faces like these, McQueen liberates himself from dialogue, and he remains a filmmaker who thinks in indelible images and sequences. So much of Blitz is internalised and felt rather than prescribed: the grandfather's pride as he hears his daughter singing on the radio (music as morale-booster, connecting back to the unforgettable Lovers Rock while also explaining the casting of long-time Red Wedge and Rock Against Racism mainstay Weller); a ghostly, half-glimpsed death on the train tracks; a late visit to a Punch & Judy show during which George is seen to note not the show itself, but the puppeteer's feet. (The comforting illusion of this world, and perhaps something of the magic, has by then been forcibly rubbed off.) Only one previous British filmmaker has come close to thinking about and filming wartime Britain in this particular pictorial fashion, and we'll arrive at him in due course.
What the new film does share with Occupied City - and this is evident long before a member of the Slow Horses ensemble shows up on screen - is the desire to collapse any complacency-inducing distinction between the past and the present, between the Britain of the 1940s and the Britain of today. This London isn't emblematic of some glorious, pre-woke past but an embryonic version of the present: the social schisms (rich/poor, native/migrant), the callous opportunism (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke do a nimble Dickensian double-act as looters preying on our boy, the dying and the dead), the cold indifference of the powers-that-be. Granted, the wars we're lucky enough to be fighting now are more cultural than physical, and fought chiefly online rather than on the ground beneath our feet. But as McQueen notes and insists, they're premised on the same principles and divisions; they demand we take action, and remain aware of them even as we seek shelter by sitting in cinemas under untroubled roofs and skies. These battles go beyond that against fascism, and extend into every corner of everyday life: when, at the last, the Tube station George himself seeks shelter in is flooded with water, it is as the rains that fell upon Spain the other week, washing away all divisions, and revealing our pettier struggles as but a drop in the ocean. With its 12A rating and Working Title logo, there is some superficial truth in the widespread critical assertion that Blitz represents McQueen at his most conventional: it's the one film of this director you can well envisage your mum and dad getting wrapped up in, were they to resist the emblandishments of the Paddington threequel. But it's also demonstrably the work of a politically conscious artist trying to broaden the horizons of the mass audience - to move us, at long last, beyond Downton and its attendant bunting. The highest praise I can bestow on Blitz, and this is finally a film that commands the highest praise, is that it's the kind of sublimely textured, ever-pointed, deeply moving popular entertainment you can imagine the late Terence Davies adoring - and perhaps being jealous he wasn't able to make in his lifetime.
Blitz is now showing in selected cinemas.
