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The firefighter’s hose that rears up like a serpent, hissing and spitting at the start of Steve McQueen’s Blitz turns out to be its most chaotic, unpredictable character. Elsewhere this is a handsomely honeyed, well-managed affair, ticking off the homefront genre boxes even as it uncovers crookery and racism in the wings. It’s 1940, the bombs are falling on London and nine-year-old evacuee George (Elliott Heffernan) has embarked on the kind of old-school boy’s adventure that wouldn’t look out of place in a Children’s Film Foundation production. He’s mixing with colourful cockneys, violent bobbies and wise air raid wardens, toiling to work his way back to his mum (Saoirse Ronan in a pencil-sketch of a role).
McQueen’s pedigree – first as a Turner Prize-winning artist, latterly as the creator of such spacious, quietly radical projects as Occupied City and the Small Axe series – naturally invites us to read deeper meanings into Blitz’s strait-laced design. But simplicity sometimes has an honest worth of its own. What the film-maker has built for us here is the cinematic equivalent of an Anderson shelter: basic, sturdy and unfussy. It’s there if we need it and have nowhere else to go.
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