Steve McQueen’s Blitz is not merely another of the many World War II film entries in the crowded canon—it’s a unvarnished, affecting tale that infuses an over-familiar episode in history with new relevancy. Opening at the BFI London Film Festival before debuting on Apple TV+, Blitz left an immediate impact with its emotional power, close-up storytelling, and absolute commitment to the lives history tends to overlook.
The idea for the movie was sparked by a single, haunting photo: a young Black boy, isolated on a train station platform, poised to be evacuated from the London Blitz. “That picture haunted me in a sort of omnipresent ghostly manner,” McQueen explained. “I kept finding myself asking myself who this child was, what his history during the Blitz had been?
” That was the question at the core of Blitz—a movie which looks at the war not from the point of view of generals or fighting, but through the eyes of those whose experiences have hitherto been passed over in silence. The film’s focus is on 9-year-old George, played with restrained force by Elliott Heffernan, and his mother Rita, played by Saoirse Ronan. As bombs blanket London, Rita reluctantly makes the agonizing choice to send George to the countryside. But George, set on going back to the city and being reunited with his mother, embarks on a journey of his own—one that thrusts both him and Rita into a frantic search amidst the looming threat of a city besieged.
Blitz doesn’t merely track their movements—it gets at the emotional barometer of war, wherein love, survival, and grit are all entwined.
McQueen’s attention to period detail is scrupulous. With the assistance of historian Joshua Levine (who collaborated with Christopher Nolan on Dunkirk), he reconstructs traumatic events such as the bombing of Café de Paris—where jazz musician Ken “Snakehips” Johnson was playing during the attack—and the Balham tube station bombing, which killed dozens. These sequences aren’t sensationalized for the sake of spectacle; they’re based in human emotion, inspired by true accounts of survival and tragedy.
But most distinctive of Blitz is its emotional timbre. McQueen employs quiet scenes as effectively as action scenes, and creates an atmosphere of haunting dread in which love and fear exist side by side. Hans Zimmer’s music—made intimate by the fact that his mother survived the Blitz—augments the emotion without swamping it. One moment, in which Rita performs a song about parental love while she toils in a factory making munitions, is especially affecting.
McQueen imagined it following the passing of his father, and it encapsulates the film’s core thesis: in a world torn apart by violence, love is the most powerful force. Representation is embedded in every shot. Blitz went out of its way to put at its center those who’d been long relegated to the margins of classic war stories—Black Londoners, working-class families, and those from the Caribbean and West Africa who were part of Britain’s domestic front. From Marcus, George’s Grenadian father, to Ife, a Yoruba air-raid warden, and Johnson himself, the film presents a rich picture of pre-Windrush London as a diverse, multicultural metropolis.
McQueen isn’t merely recounting a story from the past—he’s reclaiming voices that ought to have been heard all along.
At its heart, Blitz is a movie about legacy—how trauma, displacement, and survival reverberate over time. McQueen draws parallels between the London Blitz and the crises of Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, and elsewhere today. “It’s about love,” he states. “Because love is the only thing worth anything.” That feeling beats through every frame, imparting to the film a strong contemporary relevance despite its 1940s setting.
The London Film Festival premiere of the film was a triumphant return home for McQueen, his third to open the event. Starring Harris Dickinson, Kathy Burke, Benjamin Clementine, Stephen Graham, and even music legend Paul Weller on screen for the first time, Blitz delivers performances as complex and complex as the story itself. Blitz is as much a historical drama as a reckoning on screen. It asks us to recall not just the war, but the people who survived it in all their depth. In Rita and George’s narrative, McQueen reminds us that history is personal, memory is political, and love, in the midst of darkness, is the light we can hold on to.