Warfare is, in some ways, quite an improbable collaboration. On the one hand, we have Ray Mendoza, a veteran of the Iraq War who had never shot a film before. On the other hand, we have Alex Garland, a veteran director who, following the release of Civil War earlier in the year, announced that he planned to step back from directing. Garland has stated that he played more of a supporting directorial role for here, helping Mendoza, who was initially a military advisor on the project, to craft a tight ninety minute recreation of his experiences of a single incident that occurred on 19 November 2006, shortly after the Battle of Ramadi, in which a group of US Navy SEALS were hit by a missile while in a watch house. Mendoza apparently aimed for veracity above all else, and two of the soldiers are given their actual names – Mendoza himself, played by D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, and Elliott Miller, played Cosmo Jarvis, a soldier who lost both his legs and his speech during the attack. The film is dedicated to Miller and we see him visiting Mendoza and the set during the credits. An ensemble cast fills out the rest of the squad and includes Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton, Michael Ganfoldini and a host of others.  

The power of Garland and Mendoza’s film lies in its vision of war without flashbacks, interpersonal interludes or shifts outside the combat zone. This is war as a day job, which means that the film is sparse, austere and often tedious in its opening scenes. Here, the main labour of warfare, at least in this case, is scrupulous surveillance and superhuman patience – watching and waiting on an enemy who are also watching and waiting. Ceaselessly scanning the horizon, the SEAL team spend most of their time trying to distinguish between peeking and probing (“peeking with serious intent to probe”) in the midst of an intensified silence. When dialogue does intrude, it tends to be downbeat, as in a joke about a slightly chatty operative having “new guy energy,” or surprisingly banal, as in a soldier’s account of how his blue Nike hoodie went missing; he never seems to recover it.

As that might suggest, the driving signature of the film is the viscerality with which it depicts sound and silence during wartime conditions. In the first half, Garland and Mendoza focus mainly on silence, or sounds that barely break the threshold of silence, such as the breath of the surveillance officer following the escalating threat outside on his sniper rifle. The directors beautifully evoke the textures of everyday life continuing around the soldiers, along with the soldiers’ attempts to differentiate military threats from these textures. At times, the aesthetic is close to Chantal Akerman, as the soldiers settle into the domestic rhythms of the house they are occupying and, for a brief beat, almost feel as if they live there. Immediately after the missile hits, the most visceral element of the mise-en-scene is also the silence, as the soldiers recover consciousness and realise what has happened.

However, this silence is complemented by an unbearable surfeit of sound as Garland and Mendoza shift to what is essentially the central sequence of the film: extracting a severely wounded patient under extreme conditions. I was reminded here of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, with it insistence that bodily pain is, beyond a certain horizon, unrepresentable. The directors take us as close as possible to that horizon, however, as the focus hones in on Elliott Miller, who is “severely wounded” (an official term) by the blast. For about half an hour, there is an unmitigated, relentless, unimaginable torrent of shrieks, groans and screams, as the team drag Miller to a new location, do a “sweep” of his body, attempt to bandage his leg, and then kneel on his thigh to apply further pressure when the tourniquet won’t work. I saw the film on streaming, with the volume down low during this sequence, and even then it was almost impossible to endure, so it must have been a truly visceral experience in a cinema. After a while, the screaming is so loud that the directors have to periodically fade it into inaudibility, or shift focus to another part of the compound, just so the rest of the film remains legible. By the time relief arrives, and transports Miller to a tank under heavy fire, his legs and arms barely intact, he has reached the limits of human endurance – and I have never seen a performance that subsisted so incredibly on screams.

Likewise, the comparative silence when the film ends is quite astonishing, since the clinical abruptness with which Garland and Mendoza close things off means that the scream lingers in your head like shell shock. They continue the documentary impulse during the closing credits, which shows behind-the-scenes footage of setting up shots and sequences, with Miller on site in what appears to be a consultant role. This final silence, and the dedication to Miller, are all the more poignant in that he lost his voice in the incident. All in all, then, Warfare is an original testament to the old adage that war is long periods of boredom intercut with moments of sheer terror. It’s a bit crazy that it got better reviews than Civil War – still one of the best films of 2024 – but it’s an original, bracing and visceral watch.