WARFARE Review: In the Belly of the War Beast

A group of young men watches the music video for Eric Prydz’s iconic hit Call on Me from 2004.

The year is 2006, and the men, some of whom look more like boys, sing along and shake their bottoms enthusiastically while dressed in camouflage and wielding guns. They are Navy SEALs on a mission in Iraq, and the next day, they take up a position inside one of the local houses to provide support for the US Marines.

Their story is based on a personal account from Ray Mendoza, one of the directors here and a former SEAL, who uses his memories of this particular incident and the interviews with his teammates. We'll see their blurred-out faces during the closing credits.

Anti-war films – and it’s crucial to note that, despite its name, the film directed by Mendoza and Alex Garland is precisely that – can be roughly divided into two groups. In the first one, the authors address intricate and complex moral dilemmas that warfare inevitably brings to life. The films in the second group bypass this in favor of depicting war as hell, where hours and days of sheer boredom can and will devolve into bloody, nightmarish chaos.

While Garland’s Civil War from last year falls under the first category, Warfare belongs to the second. It's a meticulous, almost docufiction reconstruction of the events. It is also quite possibly the scariest film you will see this season.

Warfare doesn’t only come off as terrifying because of all the graphic imagery -– and when everything inevitably goes to hell, the images are, in fact, incredibly gruesome, with exposed innards, burning flesh, and severed limbs lying around. But the ruthless visuals aren’t the only thing that’s brutally realistic –- it's also the intense, foreboding sense of dread cast in the air before anything resembling action even starts. The apartment the SEALs end up occupying, much to its residents’ terror, spots unfortunate-looking reddish curtains with embroidered flowers on them, which wrap the space in an ominous red mist, a clearly bad omen. 

The narrative here is as fragmented and sparse as human memory itself. The shadows move behind the barred windows. The finger falters on a trigger. The fully diegetic sound can go mute for minutes after the soldiers have been dazed by an explosion and then burst into a torturous, desperate wail of a wounded man whose legs are on fire.

Mendoza and Garland purposefully ignore the classic narrative conventions of the genre; there is no clear goal in sight, no glorification, and no pacifist rhetoric. “Just follow the blood and smoke,” says a character at one point, no longer able to provide coherent information. There is no making sense of anything in the belly of the war beast.

In 1979, French writer Françoise Sagan, the jury chairman at the Cannes Film Festival, famously opposed awarding the main prize to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now due to the lack of perspective from the Vietnamese people in the film. While Warfare is largely dedicated to portraying the viewpoint of one specific character, it may seem that this critique applies here as well, but that is not the case.

For a brief moment at the end of the film, Mendoza gives up his account to show the Iraqi family in the aftermath of the main events. In a darkly ironic way, their reaction isn’t that much different from the soldiers’ perspective: it’s the profound feeling of confusion about what happened and what could be happening next.

The film is now playing in select theaters, via A24 Films. Visit the official site for more information.