13 Apr REVIEW – ‘Warfare’ is a war film that neither glorifies nor sanctifies, but simply bears witness
In a year already flush with high-concept genre films, Warfare lands with a kind of blistering clarity that is difficult to ignore. Directed by former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, in collaboration with Alex Garland, the film is a nerve-fraying, pulse-rattling war drama that deliberately forgoes conventional storytelling for an immersive and, at times, punishingly authentic battlefield experience. It is an experiment in form and endurance, one that asks the viewer not to follow a story so much as survive it. To watch Warfare is to feel ensnared in the noise, the confusion, the horror, and the camaraderie of a day in Ramadi during the Iraq War. The results are extraordinary.
Set in 2006 and based on Mendoza’s own experiences, the film begins with Alpha One, a Navy SEAL team, taking control of a multi-story building in the middle of a hostile neighborhood. Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) monitors their position using air support, while Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), the team’s sniper, keeps watch on a nearby marketplace. What starts as a standard hold-and-monitor mission soon becomes increasingly volatile, with heightened enemy activity forcing the men to brace for an unpredictable attack. When an explosion rips through their position and leaves several team members gravely injured, the operation escalates into a desperate scramble for evacuation and survival.
As reinforcements inch closer under fire and the possibility of extraction becomes ever more uncertain, Alpha One digs in, triaging the wounded while trying to maintain lines of communication with HQ. Commanding officer Erik (Will Poulter) attempts to hold things together, even as the leadership burden begins to slip through his fingers. The film carefully tracks the shifting power dynamics between the SEALs and their embedded translators, and how language, both literal and emotional, breaks down under pressure. When Alpha Two finally arrives, a last-ditch plan is set into motion to get the injured out, but even this is fraught with moral compromises, chain-of-command sleight of hand, and the ever-present threat of IEDs. By the end, there is no triumph, no flag planted in sand—only silence, absence, and the lingering question of what all this cost.
Much will be made of the film’s visual and sonic assault, and for good reason. Mendoza and Garland, working with cinematographer David J. Thompson and sound designer Glenn Freemantle, have constructed one of the most immersive battlefield environments in recent memory. The film is often brutally disorienting, and that’s entirely by design. The frame jitters with handheld intensity, and the audio mix feels like it has been dropped directly into your skull, with mortar blasts and shouted commands overlapping like a chaotic symphony. It’s rarely “pleasant” viewing, but it’s never anything less than purposeful. When a film commits this wholly to its thesis—war is confusion, war is noise, war is pain—the lack of traditional storytelling rhythms starts to feel like a feature, not a bug.
To that end, Warfare eschews tidy character arcs in favor of behavioral detail. There are no conventional backstories or flashbacks here. You learn who these men are by how they act under pressure: the way Erik fumbles leadership, the way John (Finn Bennett) breaks protocol for something close to compassion, the way local translator Farid (Nathan Altai) stands tall even when the hierarchy won’t protect him. These choices matter. They accumulate. And when someone collapses from blood loss or despair, it hits with a kind of thud that is almost physical. The performances carry a lived-in veracity that actors rarely achieve. It’s not that they are all “great” in the theatrical sense, but they are truthful, and that makes all the difference.
This commitment to realism is not without cost. There are stretches where Warfare can feel more like a simulation than a film. The narrative, such as it is, proceeds in real time and offers little in the way of traditional structure. There are no subplots, no romantic entanglements, no detours into stateside domesticity. For some, this may come across as monotonous or even emotionally inert. The relentlessness, while effective, does threaten to become numbing. At just 95 minutes, the film wisely avoids overstaying its welcome, but there are moments when one wishes for a breath, a beat, some form of modulation.
And while the film’s immersive qualities are mostly laudable, its narrow scope can also be a limitation. The decision to remain so tightly focused on the American military experience risks flattening the broader moral landscape. The Iraqi families in the building are present but largely voiceless, their inner lives eclipsed by the SEALs’ ordeal. One translator remarks on this imbalance, and it’s a compelling moment, but it feels like a flicker rather than a thematic thread. A film this precise in its construction could have afforded to widen its lens just a little more.
Still, what Mendoza and Garland achieve here is something singular. Warfare isn’t trying to be the definitive Iraq War film; it wants instead to replicate a single day, a single firefight, and what that does to the body and mind. In that, it succeeds almost completely. The lack of overt editorialising—there is no narrator, no onscreen text reminding us of the larger political context—feels less like avoidance and more like a deliberate narrowing of the field. This is war as experienced in the moment: messy, terrifying, and often senseless. That the film leaves you to draw your own conclusions is not a failure of nerve but a challenge to the viewer.
It helps that the film is so rigorously crafted. The use of natural light, the muffled exchanges during tense pauses, the way the camera lingers on the wounded without melodrama—this is mature filmmaking. Garland’s influence is present in the eerie, almost uncanny quiet between firefights, but Mendoza brings the physicality, the dirt-under-the-fingernails specificity of what it means to carry someone while your ears ring from a nearby explosion. Their collaboration works because they meet in the middle: one a master of psychological disquiet, the other of procedural detail.
In a different year, Warfare might have been buried under flashier titles, but its stark immediacy and raw formalism have made it something that should have been released during awards season later this year. It won’t be for everyone—nor should it be—but for those willing to meet it on its own terms, it offers something rare: a war film that neither glorifies nor sanctifies, but simply bears witness. It asks you to sit in the dirt, to wait for the radio call, to feel the weight of another human body as it slips from your hands. If there’s a single image that lingers, it’s not the gunfire or the smoke, but the quiet after. The camera holds, the sound drops out, and you’re left with breath. Yours. Theirs. And then the silence.
Warfare is a film of extraordinary discipline and piercing clarity. It doesn’t just depict combat—it embodies it. And while that may sound like faint praise in an era of increasingly visceral war dramas, the film’s conviction, its precision, and its refusal to flinch from discomfort elevate it. This is not a film about heroes or villains. It is about the people in between. The ones who come home changed, and the ones who don’t come home at all.
Distributor: A24
Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton
Directors: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland
Producers: Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Matthew Penry-Davey, Peter Rice
Screenplay: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland
Cinematography: David J. Thompson
Production Design: Mark Digby
Costume Design: David Crossman, Neil Murphy
Editor: Fin Oates
Running Time: 95 minutes
Release Date: 17th April 2025 (Australia)