Christopher Nolan makes the Dunkirk evacuation a gripping exercise in survival, carried by exposed landscapes, exact cutting and an insistent score. The characters can feel underwritten, but the fear is hard to shake.
Dunkirk is a gripping survival thriller, with less room for individual character than we would like. Christopher Nolan turns the evacuation into a succession of immediate problems: survive the next danger, then find a way home. We were frightened by the men waiting on the beach, with so little around them that could offer protection. The opening fall of leaflets establishes how little control those below have over what comes towards them.
Lee Smith cuts between land, sea and air, working with three strands that run across different spans of time. The cutting keeps one danger active while moving to another, so a new location seldom offers a rest. This is elaborate storytelling, but its immediate effect is easy to understand: somebody needs help and time is running short. A few shifts make us notice the construction, briefly interrupting the fear, though the editing usually gives us enough to follow the immediate action.
Hoyte van Hoytema gives the men so much space around them that they seem horribly exposed. The beach views let us take in the scale without offering the pleasure usually attached to a large image. Nathan Crowley’s production design makes the evacuation feel physically awkward, with men crowded onto ground that cannot protect them. The figures are small enough to be overlooked, and the framing makes us look harder at their predicament.
Fionn Whitehead makes Tommy’s fear legible without overplaying his distress. Mark Rylance gives Mr. Dawson a steadiness that the film needs amid so much alarm. Cillian Murphy’s Shivering Soldier makes the damage done by fear uncomfortable to watch. These performances work within the sparse dialogue, making duty and exhaustion readable without histories to explain them. The screenplay leaves the actors to establish much of what distinguishes one man from another.
The lack of backstory is mostly a relief in a genre that can stop a battle to explain a childhood. Yet some of the young men remain difficult to distinguish as personalities, even when their predicament is clear. We do not need a speech about home for everyone, but a few more individual habits would help. Christopher Nolan leaves too much of that work to the cast, particularly when the action gives them so little time to establish themselves.
Hans Zimmer’s score applies pressure almost continuously, often making the wait for danger as punishing as its arrival. Its insistence gives even the pauses a sense that something is about to happen. We also wished it would ease off more often: the beach and the faces already supply plenty to worry about. The force of the sound is central to the film’s hold on us, though the quieter passages suggest it could sometimes manage with less music.
Allow the film its full 107 minutes without interruption. Its tension depends on carrying one stretch of fear into the next, and a pause does more damage here than it would to a talkier war drama. A large screen helps us read the vulnerable figures within the wider view, but attention matters more than size. The 12A certificate should not be mistaken for an easy evening.
