“Blitz” Mostly Hits Dramatic Target

Blitz (Steve McQueen, 2024) 3½ out of 5 stars

In Blitz, British director Steve McQueen (Widows) places us in the middle of the eponymous Nazi campaign of bombings over the city of London (from September, 1940, to May, 1941). He centers the narrative on a mother and son, Rita and George, played respectively by Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun) and newcomer Elliott Heffernan. She is white and he is mixed-race; his father, deported for reasons we come to learn and therefore not a part of his life, is Black. Together, along with her father (George’s grandfather), they do their utmost to survive. If sometimes a little too diffuse a tale, it remains mostly engaging for the length of its runtime.

McQueen uses this small family unit not only to up the dramatic stakes by personalizing the ravages of war, but also to make searing indictments of the human capacity for racism even when solidarity should be on everyone’s minds. No matter where you go, expect to encounter our worst possible tendencies. Fortunately, there are kind people to be found even in hard times, though sometimes they hide away. In Blitz, McQueen shows the good and the bad of our species.

Given the ongoing nightly attacks, Rita and her father, Gerald (singer Paul Weller), decide to send the nine-year-old George off to the countryside, which opening title cards explain was a common practice at the time. The British government organized many trains to evacuate children from the city, and these children would then be housed in the homes of volunteers. George—happy with his mother and grandfather, no matter the danger—does not want to go. Angry at Rita, he runs off at the station, refusing to say goodbye. She is understandably upset.

Once on the train and on his way, George encounters taunts from some of the other kids, though heeding Gerald’s advice, he calls out the bullies and challenges them to a fight. Not surprisingly, they are “all mouth and no trousers” (a phrase Gerald taught him) and back down. Inspired by that easy victory, George decides to leap off the moving car to head back to mom.

The rest of the film follows George as he struggles to make his way home and Rita as she tries to find him, all while the bombs keep falling. They each have adventures and misadventures as they go, allowing McQueen to create a detailed landscape that does justice to the time and place. Some of it feels a little too crafted to be entirely moving, but other sequences land with sincerely poignant sentiment.

The supporting cast is excellent, among them Benjamin Clémentine (Dune), Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness), Stephen Graham (Venom: Let There Be Carnage), and a number of very talented child performers, to name just some. McQueen crafts a movie that, whatever its narrative faults, reminds us that love is the salve that heals all wounds. In a time of rising racism and fascism, that’s as important a lesson now as it ever was.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.