Steve McQueen gives physical discomfort time to become unbearable, and we rate his patient, exacting filmmaking highly. In Blitz, that gift is too often lost as he hurries from one encounter to the next.
Fi1m perspective
In Hunger (2008), Steve McQueen leaves us looking at filthy cells long enough to feel how living in them would wear a person down. The early stretches have little dialogue, and routine continues around the violence. We were horrified by how ordinary the brutality seemed amid those prison routines. McQueen's feature debut is a strong reason to seek out his work, though it supplies less historical context than the suffering needs.
The steadiness of Sean Bobbitt's cinematography matters because the violence is not allowed to pass in a blur. Tom McCullagh's production design makes the cells cramped places to endure, rather than convenient spaces for actors. McQueen and co-writer Enda Walsh also give Liam Cunningham's priest enough substance to challenge Michael Fassbender's Bobby Sands. Fassbender makes conviction difficult company. Occasionally the careful composition draws attention to itself, but McQueen mostly keeps us concerned with the people being filmed.
His beginnings in video installation help explain that willingness to hold a shot. Shame (2011) returned to Fassbender for an exploration of sex addiction, while 12 Years a Slave (2013) again trusted sustained attention to a body under duress. With Widows (2018), co-written with Gillian Flynn, he took on the heist thriller. Yet the turn towards broader storytelling did not require him to abandon small spaces. Lovers Rock, part of Small Axe (2020), spends much of its length in a single front room.
That makes the restlessness of Blitz (2024) frustrating. Its opening, with firemen losing control of a hose in a bombed street, has the force and clarity of his strongest work. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux stays low and close, making the men seem small beside the water, while Adam Stockhausen's production design gives London a solidity that makes its destruction more alarming. But as George walks home after leaving an evacuation train, the film struggles to decide between fable and adventure.
Benjamin Clementine's quiet performance as Ife, who walks with George through the dark, gives Blitz the human interest its constant movement too often interrupts. We would happily have stayed with those two for longer. The film's reluctance to linger is particularly disappointing from a director who can make us attend so closely to someone sitting still. For a first encounter, choose Hunger and take the warning about its violence seriously.
Biography
Steve McQueen is a British film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on 9 October 1969 in London. He studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design and film at Goldsmiths College, and began making short films before winning the Turner Prize in 1999.
McQueen made his feature debut with Hunger (2008). Subsequent films include Shame (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Widows (2018) and Blitz (2024), which he also wrote and produced. He created the anthology series Small Axe (2020) for television. He received a BFI Fellowship in 2016 and was knighted in 2020 for services to art and film.
