Blitz Is Steve McQueen’s Most Conventional Film to Date – and That’s No Bad Thing

Steve McQueen’s Blitz is the artist-turned-filmmaker’s most conventional film to date, targeted at a mass audience with the aim of cutting through sentimental myths about London during the second world war. Half the length of his previous film about the war, Occupied City (2023), about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, it stars Elliott Heffernan as George, a nine-year-old mixed-race child born to an absent Black father and a white mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), who both live with Rita’s father Gerald (played, surprisingly movingly, by musician Paul Weller) in Stepney, east London. Conventional not only in theme but in form, the narrative follows the classical plot structure, or hero’s journey, almost to the letter.

The film finds George, Rita and Gerald living happily in a Victorian terraced house, of a kind that was often romanticised after their wartime destruction and replacement by tower blocks. There is a ghost lurking amid this bliss: George’s father (Rita’s relationship with Marcus, a Black musician from Grenada, is explored through the sparing use of flashback). The inciting incident comes when George is evacuated: Rita is distraught to put him on the train to the countryside, especially after he tells her “I hate you!” and races down the platform without saying goodbye. Racially abused by other children in his carriage, George jumps off of the moving train and tries to make his way back home. This sets up a deceptively simple thriller: will George make it or not? And, given the circumstances, will “home” even be there if he makes it back?

McQueen has made several standard-length features with big-name actors and relatively straightforward narratives, starting with Hunger (2008) about the Irish hunger strike; Shame (2011), about a sex addict living in New York; 12 Years a Slave (2013), based on the memoirs of freed slave Solomon Northup; and heist film Widows (2018). However, some reviews of Blitz have expressed disappointment at just how conventional its narrative seems to be. McQueen’s background as a video artist (he won the Turner prize in 1999) is visible more in the cinematography than in the storytelling, and then only fleetingly. The opening scene of bombs falling in slow motion ends not with the horror of impact but with a screenful of static dissolving into a black-and-white field of daisies, the jerking camera subtly unsettling the bucolic scene.

That opening scene sets up the most interesting aspect of Blitz: its refusal to allow untroubled identification with any heroes, its constant reversal of the emotional charges. From the start, the film doesn’t flinch from the horror of the situation. The flames are blinding, the screams and sirens deafening. Smoke is everywhere. The firefighters do their best but the odds are well against them – even before the hose malfunctions and derails their efforts. These interruptions and frustrations characterise the film. Every time you think George has found the person who will help him back to Stepney, there is a shock, a betrayal or a death.

So many deaths in the blitz, the film suggests, came not from the bombs but the chaos they wrought. Watching people furiously demand to use Stepney Green tube station as an air raid shelter, I was reminded of the deadly crush at Bethnal Green in 1943, covered up by the government. Later, George sleeps in a station that takes a hit, bursting the water mains and flooding it, an echo of the catastrophe at Balham in October 1940, when a bomb hit a tube station in which around 600 people were sheltering, killing approximately 68 people.

Violence is everywhere, and not just Nazi violence. A policeman or shopkeeper angrily tells George to clear off; a street game of cricket is ruined when another boy calls George “a Black bastard”. We see plenty of Black faces in this film, including people from the empire who have come to help with the war effort, such as Nigerian blackout warden Ife (played by another musician, Benjamin Clémentine). However, McQueen attacks the myth that the Black community arrived in the UK on the Empire Windrush in 1948 (George’s existence is proof of this), and we see so many instances of racism that Ife has to lecture people about their prejudices and remind them they are fighting Nazi Germany’s racist policies. His speech jars as one of Blitz’s few didactic moments, leading George to accept his blackness in a touching moment with Ife, but yet again, this potential reprieve is swiftly broken.

Soon after, George falls into the hands of a criminal gang, with its ringleaders brilliantly played by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke. They start by using George to crawl into a bombed-out jewellery shop, then bring him into a concert hall where they rob – and ridicule – the dead. There was widespread looting amidst the blitz and blackouts, with over 4,500 cases tried at the Old Bailey in December 1940, and the rampant criminality is not something those who talk of the “blitz spirit” tend to emphasise. Even if people could keep calm and carry on, they were traumatised: McQueen captures this in a memorable scene of Rita singing in a concert at her factory, staged to boost morale and broadcast on BBC Radio, hours after her tearful parting from George. As much as Heffernan’s, Ronan’s performance gives Blitz its intense emotional power, and along with the film’s evocation of racism, makes it a valuable contribution to a war film canon that one might have thought needed no further expansion.

My main anxiety with Blitz is that the people who most need their preconceptions challenged by it are unlikely to watch it. I had a similar feeling when I saw Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016), about the ravages of austerity, or Sorry We Missed You (2019), on gig economy labour. 80 years after the war, no one will censor this film in the way they did Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965), which showed people behaving selfishly and panicking under a nuclear bomb threat, and which the BBC refused to show after commissioning it for their Wednesday Play series; or Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here (1966), which suggested the British public would have kept calm and carried on under German occupation (as they largely did in Jersey), and which had a scene of neo-Nazis detailing their antisemitic ideology cut after complaints from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Some of McQueen’s films were made for galleries, some for cinemas; his Small Axe films were produced for the BBC, but the age of confrontational, socially conscious works such as Blitz getting made for millions of television viewers is long over.

As I wrote about recently, the memory of the two world wars has increasingly been weaponised for right-wing ends over the last few decades, with the second positioned as a time when a white, Christian nation – and particularly England – stood alone but firm against Nazism, just before waves of immigration irrevocably changed the country’s character. Amidst this, we have gone from Tony Blair giving an anti-immigration speech at the symbolic white cliffs of Dover in 2005 to the far right, whipped up by the tabloids and then the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to ‘defend’ the cenotaph and the Churchill statue at Parliament Square from Black Lives Matter and later pro-Palestine protests, before the anti-migrant riots and attempted pogroms across England over the summer. In such conditions, structuring a film like Blitz along commercial lines feels like the right decision – a work this honest about a myth that underpins so much of this country’s corrosive, nostalgic conservative politics, reminding us that not just London but England, the UK and the British Empire were always diverse and exchanging populations, needs to reach as many people as possible.