Garland and Mendoza rebuild a 2006 Ramadi firefight in real time from the memories of the men who fought it, and it is the most convincing combat we have sat through in years. What it will not tell you is why anyone was there.
Ray Mendoza was a Navy SEAL in Ramadi in 2006, and Warfare is his account of one day there, written and directed with Alex Garland and built, a title card tells us, from the memories of the men who were present. There is no score, no voiceover and no caption explaining the war. A platoon takes over a two-storey house at night, the family who live there are put in a back room, and a sniper settles at an upstairs window to watch the street. For a long stretch that is the whole film: men on a concrete floor, a radio, a jet passing low, and a long wait.
Then something does happen, and we will not say what. Because the film runs in real time and never cuts away, every minute the men spend waiting is a minute we spend with them.
David J. Thompson holds the camera at shoulder height in corridors and stairwells, so we rarely see more than the men can. Mark Digby’s house is a family home with the furniture pushed to the walls and a fine grey dust over everything, and once that dust is in the air we could tell the men apart only by their voices on the radio, since David Crossman and Neil Murphy have put every one of them in the same sand-coloured kit under the same helmet. Fin Oates cuts to a single rule, which is that time is not allowed to skip, so the lulls run as long as the firefights.
The sound is the film’s main instrument. A jet passes and the house shakes; gunfire outside is a flat crack, gunfire inside is a blow to the chest. When the worst thing happens the mix drops to a thin whine, as if we had been standing beside it, and then the screaming starts and does not stop. We were horrified. We sat for what must have been twenty minutes with our shoulders up round our ears. It is not the blood that does it, though there is plenty. It is that the screaming is treated like the dust, as a fact of the house that nobody on screen can do anything about either.
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Ray, the man on the radio, and spends most of the film reading grid references into a handset while his face does something else entirely; the film is built on that performance. Will Poulter’s Erik is the officer, and Poulter shows a man keeping his voice level while his eyes give up on him. Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor and Finn Bennett fill out the platoon, and Michael Gandolfini arrives late as a lieutenant. Nobody has a photograph of a girlfriend or a story about home. We know these men by their jobs and their fear.
What it will not say is why. The Iraqi family are glimpsed through a doorway and barely spoken to, and the men firing at the house are never more than shapes. Garland and Mendoza have decided that the platoon did not know either, and that the film should know no more than they did. Most critics have taken this as the point and praised it; two have called the result empty. We are between them. For 95 minutes the choice works, because the fear on screen is convincing. Afterwards, in the car park, we knew exactly what the day had felt like and nothing about what it had been for, and we think the makers would call that the right condition to leave in.
Against Garland’s Civil War (2024), this is the more disciplined film. See it in a cinema if you can, with the sound turned up as far as it will go; at home the walls do not shake and the film is a good deal smaller for it. The 15 certificate is stern and deserved. Do not bring anyone squeamish, and do not expect much conversation on the way out.
