Warfare

CinemaSerf: A squad of American soldiers seemingly randomly select an house in Ramadi and having relocated it’s sleeping occupants to the ground floor, set up a sniper station from where they can monitor the goings on around them. Initially, this all looks harmless enough as the Iraqi locals go about their business, but gradually the spotters become suspicious of repetitive activity, the odd person who seems to be snooping on them - and then, well all hell breaks loose leaving them facing an existential threat that will test their mettle, their equipment and require some feats of legerdemain if they are to survive long enough to be rescued. There is quite some intensity to this drama as the young men under siege must each deal with their fears, strengths and weaknesses under a constant stream of fire. Will Poulter’s “Erik” leads the team, but the best effort for me came from his comms man “Ray” (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) and, though sparingly, from Kit Connor’s rookie “Tommy” who, like us watching, had no idea what they were doing in this house and what the purpose of their mission actually was in the first place. There isn’t so much a script as an increasingly nervous dialogue that disintegrates as their predicament becomes more perilous and the photography and particularly the audio serve really well in conveying a sense of the lethally claustrophobic atmosphere in which these men had to function. Real veterans wrote the story, advised the production and that shows in something that is certainly incomplete from a narrative perspective, but is uncomfortably enthralling to watch and graphically displays the horrors of urban warfare.