Director: Steve McQueen

Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Hefferman, Paul Weller, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham

Steve McQueen’s wartime set drama is a surprisingly mainstream and conservative effort. Ronan is Rita, a young single mother working in a munitions factory and living with her dad Gerald (a winningly humble and understated acting debut from Paul Weller) and biracial young son Elliot (Hefferman) in Stepney Green in the East End of London. Nighttime Luftwaffe raids are becoming more frequent and with the authorities unwilling to open the Tube stations, despite the shortage of other shelter provisions, Rita makes the agonising decision to have George evacuated to the countryside. En route, George jumps from the train and tries to make his way back to his London home. Here, the picture turns into a kind of Dickensian odyssey as George traverses the capital and encounters a range of vivid characters, including a Fagin meets Bill Sykes criminal Albert (Graham, not exactly stretching himself here as an unhinged nutter) who pressgangs the boy into joining his band of thieves. Save for some striking, almost impressionistic images that horrifyingly convey the heat, flash and blind panic of wartime London, this a disappointingly conventional middlebrow drama, more suited to teatime telly than the big screen. The well-intentioned script that looks to celebrate London’s diversity and the spirit of unity forged in war, while laudable, is workmanlike and often clumsily didactic.

David Willoughby

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