Saoirse Ronan suffers Nazi horror in a World War II drama

There is terror in both the cacophony and the silence, and flash is at its most compelling when it exploits the interplay between the chaotic and the calm to suggest the maddening madness of the Nazi bombing of London in September 1940.

Director Steve McQueen’s second consecutive World War II deployment, following his 262-minute 2023 documentary Occupied cityThe formally completed film is an immersive descent into a hell full of fear, death and separation. Nonetheless, it is also a narratively and emotionally disjointed journey whose good leads, moving details and racist comments never come together to form a poignant spectacle.

(flash was the final selection of this year’s New York Film Festival. The film hits theaters on November 1st and will be released on Apple TV+ on November 22nd.)

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is a single mother living in Stepney, east London, with her piano-playing father Gerald (Paul Weller) and her 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), whose blackness makes him and his Caucasian mother the routine Recipient of racist epithets. To support the war cause, Rita works in a munitions factory, building bombs for use against Hitler’s troops, who have turned her home life into a nightmare of constant air raid sirens and frantic escapes to shelters.

Nevertheless, these warnings and refuges are not enough to ensure the safety of the population and the government has therefore decided to send children out of the city until the blitz ends. This is a smart strategy that Rita agrees with, but George is far less happy about being relocated to unfamiliar rural areas alone. At the moment of his departure, he callously tells his tormented mother that he hates her, gets on the train and refuses to say goodbye to her.

Newcomer Heffernan has innate charisma, but George is a shallow vessel for ideas of resilience, regret and strength. Rita is also underdeveloped; While she was chosen from all her colleagues to sing on a live BBC radio show and is passionately devoted to her child, her inner life seems to be all general grief and longing. The radiant Ronan strives to give Rita an empathetic personality, and she is always captivating. Still, her heroine has nothing but a devotion to grinning and enduring this misery, making her a rather uninteresting center of attention.

As soon as George has taken his seat on the train, he is confronted with intolerant taunts from tiny tyrants, whom he triumphantly intimidates and then, following his grandfather, describes as “all mouth and no trousers”. George certainly doesn’t lack determination, and feeling bad about how he treated his mother when they left – and not interested in being away from her – jumps out of the speeding vehicle.

Shortly afterwards he gets on another train and discovers that there are three blind brothers in his car. Together, the children share George’s sandwich and climb onto the roof of the locomotive to hoot and holler as the locomotive whistles. However, this feeling of exhilaration does not last; After getting out, George experiences a terrible tragedy that leaves him once again on his own, determined to avoid capture and forced evacuation.

flash habitually alternates between loud and quiet moments, and this back-and-forth dynamic is key to its harrowing tension. The film’s tonal (and tonal) transitions reflect a world in dangerous upheaval and complement set pieces that quickly spiral into madness, culminating in a subway disaster that appears out of nowhere. However, McQueen and Yorick Le Saux’s beautiful images cannot make up for the strange narrative omissions and general lack of structure in both the main plot and several subplots. Harris Dickinson’s Jack, for example, is a soldier who has his eye on Rita, and yet he remains a superfluous background cipher with no real purpose other than to somewhat suggest a future for Rita that never materializes.

Racism rears its ugly head at regular intervals, be it a flashback to Rita and George’s father Marcus (CJ Beckford) in a jazz club, George’s encounter with an African-born soldier (Benjamin Clementine) who instills in him pride in his blackness, or the boy who is angrily shooed out of a bakery window by an unpleasant owner. However, there is no connection between this bigotry and the (invisible) prejudices of the Nazis or a connection between this hatred and the film’s image of solidarity as a bulwark against disaster. These examples seem unrelated to the overwhelming plight of the main characters and are too sketchy to cause much shock or outrage.

McQueen’s latest work begins with firefighters furiously struggling to contain an out-of-control water hose that twists and screams in the air like an angry snake, and their eventual success highlights the story’s focus on the need for togetherness. Unfortunately, the writer/director’s script is too scattered and flimsy to pursue this idea. Better are the casual, casual touches – a foot hopping along to a well-sung song; a strand of hair blowing gently in the wind; an enemy bomber gliding overhead, illuminated by nearby explosions; George throwing a rock across a crowded sidewalk—that conveys a lot with minimal fanfare. Particularly memorable is the shot of a woman drawing individual lines across a friend’s calves to simulate the look of stockings, which says more about the needs, needs and desires of the British people than most of her dialogue.

Courtesy of the New York Film Festival

While George tries to return home and Rita works in a bomb shelter, flash provides both characters with replacements for each other. McQueen does little with this, and he does little with George’s brief enlistment in a gang led by Albert (Stephen Graham) that loots smoldering houses and steals jewelry from fresh corpses. This interlude has a welcome Dickensian touch, but no sooner is it introduced than it is discarded, and George takes the opportunity to flee from his captors, never to be seen or heard from again. Graham’s involvement is so fleeting that it’s unclear why it was included at all – or, conversely, why it wasn’t fleshed out, since it’s the film’s most colorful passage.

Ronan’s magnetic presence and flashThe polish is enough to prevent it from ever becoming completely dull. For a film about this devastating chapter of British history, however, the lack of explosiveness is a not insignificant shortcoming.