There’s terror in both cacophony and silence, and Blitz is most arresting when it exploits the interplay between the chaotic and the tranquil to suggest the seesawing insanity of the Nazis’ September 1940 bombing campaign against London.

Director Steve McQueen’s second straight WWII effort following his 262-minute 2023 documentary Occupied City, the formally accomplished film is an immersive descent into a hell of fear, death, and separation. Nonetheless, it’s also a narratively and emotionally disjointed journey, its fine lead performances, moving details, and racial commentary never cohering into an affecting spectacular.

(Blitz was the closing night selection of this year’s New York Film Festival. It hits theaters Nov. 1 ahead of its release on Apple TV Nov. 22.)

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is a single mother who resides in Stepney with her piano-playing father Gerald (Paul Weller) and her 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), whose Blackness makes him and his Caucasian mom the routine recipient of racial epithets. To aid the wartime cause, Rita works in a munitions factory building bombs to be used against Hitler’s forces, who have turned her metropolitan home into a nightmare of constant air-raid sirens and frantic flights to shelters.

Saorise Ronan and Elliott Heffernan

Still, those warnings and sanctuaries are insufficient to keep the populace safe, and the government has thus decided to have children sent out of the city until the Blitz concludes. This is a shrewd strategy, and one that Rita agrees with, but George is far less happy about being relocated on........

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