Blitz: an 'odyssey through Britain at war'

The artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen has said he was inspired to write Blitz "after seeing a faded photograph of a black child with other evacuees at the height of the Luftwaffe's bombing of London", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail.

The result is a "thoroughly enjoyable" adventure, set in 1940 and starring Elliott Heffernan as George, a mixed-race nine-year-old whose mother (the "excellent" Saoirse Ronan) packs him off from Paddington Station with a cardboard tag around his neck.

But though the Blitz is raging, George doesn't want to leave London, so an hour into the trip, he jumps off the train, determined to make his way back to Stepney Green. Predictably, his journey proves to be "fraught with peril", as bombs rain down and he falls into the hands of a Bill Sikes-like character played by Stephen Graham.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Racism features in the story too, and in a way that in places feels a bit thinly drawn – but in essence, this is "a cracking yarn, nicely told". The film is certainly "worth seeing", said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. "But it doesn't have quite the impact" of some of McQueen's other films ("12 Years a Slave", "Hunger"); nor does it quite know what it is. Sometimes, it's "a dark Dickensian tale"; other times, it's a feel-good film "about plucky women standing up for themselves". At its "nerve-shredding best, it's a stark depiction of a situation in which death could strike at any moment"; but it's more a "scrapbook" than a "fully realised film".

Well, I found it "sensational", said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. George's "odyssey through Britain at war" is moving and "morally provoking". This is "big-picture British cinema of a scale and depth" the country hasn't seen since 2017's "Dunkirk".