Herald rating: * * * *
Cast: Ray Winstone, Tilda Swinton, Lara Belmont, Freddie Cunliffe
Director: Tim Roth.
Rating: R18
Running time: 99 minutes.
Opens: Boxing Day, Rialto
Review: Peter Calder
The family whose hideous dysfunction gives the title to the ferocious and unsettling debut-as-director of a veteran actor (Roth was the nervy
gunman in the diner in Pulp Fiction but his stage and screen pedigree stretches back more than 20 years) crash the car as they rush Mum to the maternity hospital.
The accident is a horrendous jolt to them - and us - and they are depicted in succeeding scenes as bruised but unbowed.
However, it doesn't take us long to learn that they are on a much more deadly collision course.
Teenage son Tom (Cunliffe) is consumed by adolescent rage.
This turns to something much more disturbing when he witnesses - in a scene of chilling control we see nothing but the expression on his face at a window - the nature of the relationship between his father and his sister Jessie (Belmont).
The film, written by Alexander Stewart from his own novel, is deeply challenging because it treats incest not just as rape-by-father, but locates it in a complicated tangle of psycho-sexual tension within the family - and delivers it to us through the eyes of a sexually confused adolescent boy.
Roth copped his share of criticism for that but assessed in its artistic context - which crosses gritty British realism with a European arthouse tradition which includes Fassbinder and Bergman - The War Zone succeeds magnificently.
It's anything but luridly exploitative - the single, unbearably explicit shot is unflinchingly long and filmed uncut at medium range.
Meantime the design is dark and painterly, the pace muted.
But it's driven by performances of fierce intelligence - Swinton's Mum seems a non-entity but, watched closely, she emerges as deeply complicit.
And Winstone's volcanic Dad is an awesome and terrifying achievement.
It's not a movie for a romantic night out but it's a distinctive, courageous work of considerable mastery. Handle with care.
