As the director of the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen has proven himself to be an expert at approaching well-known historical horrors from revelatory new angles, and an expert at mixing mainstream thrills with the innovations that smack of his earlier career as a groundbreaking visual artist. That’s what he attempts again in Blitz, the opening film at the London Film Festival. A sprawling drama about the bombing of London by German planes in World War Two, it tries to show us afresh what it must have been like to endure such an ordeal – an ordeal which people are still enduring today – and it almost succeeds. Certainly, it has enough unique, inspired sequences to make it worth seeing. But Blitz doesn’t quite have the impact of 12 Years a Slave or some of McQueen’s other films (Hunger, Shame). One obvious difference is that 12 Years a Slave was based on an account of one person’s life, whereas Blitz appears to be based on a whole library of research material – too much material for the director, who also wrote the script, to boil down into a gripping narrative with a consistent tone. 

Its hero is George (Elliott Heffernan), a nine-year-old mixed-race boy who lives in the working-class east end of London with his white mother, Rita, played by Saoirse Ronan, and his grandad, played by rock ‘n’ roll legend Paul Weller. (He’s competent enough, but I can think of 20 proper actors off the top of my head who would have done a better job.) In September 1940, George’s family decides that it’s not safe for him to stay with them any longer, and that he has to join the many evacuees who are packed onto trains to the countryside. But George has other ideas, jumping off the train and making his way back to London. But travelling alone across the capital would be risky enough for a nine year old at any time. At a time when bombs are dropping, it’s far more dangerous.