Dunkirk

(Christopher Nolan/2017/UK, USA, France, Netherlands)

Eschewing dialogue in favour of telling the story through sound and vision Dunkirk is an ambitious and artistic undertaking that successfully puts you in the midst of the tension and terror of the mass extraction of allied troops from Northern France in 1940. As an added touch it takes three timelines of differing length and viewpoints that cross at a couple of points and weaves them together over the course of two hours. So we have a week at the beach with the troops awaiting transport, a day at sea with civilians aiding the Navy and an hour in the air with a spitfire pilot defending the ships from enemy bombers. It sounds confused and certainly there is jumping back and forth in time but it all makes sense and each narrative unfurls and reveals aspects of the other two with a dawning sense of the scale of the operation involved. It’s a superb movie that blossoms before you like a flower. The minimal dialogue is affecting and the score by Hans Zimmer is brilliant and immersive and relays the rising panic and fear and tension as everyone waits like sitting ducks for either a boat to take them home or a German plane to strike terror from the skies. The desperation of the situation pervades the film like an odour of impending doom and the score is absolutely central to this. It’s a wholly visceral cinematic experience and a film unlike any other I’ve seen from a mainstream director in quite a while. Christopher Nolan has been one to watch for some time now but Dunkirk is an achievement that makes him an essential director to follow.

(4/5)