Directed by Michael J. Bassett
Running time 94 mins
Certificate 15
War is hell, as the old maxim goes. It has therefore also been an occasional source of hellish environments for film makers. Clive Barker used the trenches of the First World War as the point of origin for one of his twisted Hellraiser demons, the Cenobites: Michael Mann's oft-ignored World War Two gore-fest The Keep placed evil against evil as Nazis found themselves pitched against an ancient diabolical force: even the first Predator movie was a ramped-up take on the jungle war flick, with added big bad beasties. Deathwatch therefore enters a small but established canon, one that has usually pitched soldiers against physical opponents, monsters against which their guns and muscles will have some effect. This time around, however, the enemy is less purely physical and more metaphysical.
Set on the Western Front in 1917, it starts with a squad of British troops about to go over the top against the German front lines. The usual tradition of the Great War movie is already out the window, as they are all about the long build-up to the inevitable blood bath at the end of the picture. Here the offensive is the kick-off, with the platoon walking straight into a hail of bullets and somehow surviving the experience. This is one step short of a miracle, as they all observe: but when the miracle involves not getting slaughtered, that's a miracle you don't question. Attempting to find a medical station for one of their wounded, they instead stagger across a German forward trench: oddly, there are only three defenders left, and they seem less interested with dealing with the Tommys than looking for something else in the trench. In a short exchange of fire, one dies, one is taken prisoner and one disappears into the fog.
This seems to be a double miracle, succeeding in surviving and taking a trench. But those miracles seem to be tarnished. The trench doesn't seem to serve any purpose, pointing in no particular direction. Even by the standards of the front line, it's a charnel house, dense with German corpses in various stages of decomposition: worryingly, may seem to have died at the hands of other Germans. There's the odd noises in the night, like an offensive that never seems to reach them. Then there's the first killing, one of the squad shredded with barbed wire. There seems to be someone in the trench with them. Someone or something, obviously.
In the recent burst of British horror movies, misguidedly spearheaded by 28 Days Later... and nobly supported by the ultra-cheap Dog Soldiers, Deathwatch could have been the worst. Low to no budget, burdened down with a slew of one-hit Brit pack actors (Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell is as big name as it gets) and an inexperienced writer/director (Michael Basset's high-line credit to date was as a director in fifth rate Mission Impossible TV show Bugs. Instead, and in a way that ensures that it will probably gain no recognition outside of the horror community, it's by far the best, a cold, dank, bloody slab of cinema.
Deathwatch is best described as Mario Bava's Saving Private Ryan. Stuck in a trench that seems to defy logic, assailed occasionally by unseen, uncanny forces which become so terrifying that they outweigh the threat of advancing German troops, a squad of British soldiers turn slowly insane, against each other and then, finally, to face the overwhelming possibility that something truly hellish may have them in its vile clutches. The film is far more interested in their reactions than in the individual moments of bloodshed: while Bell may have little more to do than stare in wide-eyed horror and distorted innocence as the world collapses around him, there's a whole series of stand-out performances. It's the most high-profile performance in years by Hugh O'Conor, the coal-eyed protagonist of the brilliant black comedy The Young Poisoner's Handbook and star of the oft-forgotten 80's rubber monster extravaganza Rawhead Rex. While Bell is supposed to struggle with the possibilities of what is happening, O'Conor's Bradford stares pointedly into the abyss and gives the audience an idea of the monstrous evil that awaits. Making cryptic comments, he sets himself up in No man's Land, butchering anyone that attempts to leave the trench: he is not the malicious force, or even its servant, but instead determined to make sure that no-one will leave. Whatever it is, his purpose is too keep that place separate from the world beyond.
His presence, and the dour, fetid camera work of Hubert Taczanowski go a long way to setting the mood of blank despair that pervades this movie. It's quite unusual to see a movie this prepared to build up the sense of doom so heavily and also erupt into bloody gore. The on-screen deaths, whether in military fashion or at the hands of eldritch powers, are gruesome, even stomach churning. However, Bassett uses this not as a flight of fancy, an alleviation of the mood with bursts of spectacle, but instead as a re-enforcement of the horror. The gore is a symptom of the terror, not how it is induced.
It has been released, in the UK at least, at an unusual time. It risks going head to head with the evil triumvirate of franchises (Bond, Potter and Tolkien) who, between them, will be leaving little screen space for other, smaller movies to turn a profit. However it is in that last movie, The Two Towers, that it does have a slight ace up its sleeve. There will be undoubted note made in news columns that Andy Serkis, who here plays the deranged and thuggish Quinn, also provides the human substructure for the CGI Gollum in the upcoming Tolkien adaptation. Initially coming across as little more than someone who studied Sam Fuller's Steel Helmet too closely, he has the bravery to turn Quinn into the biggest human monster of the film. While the other soldiers fear the chaos and that war is turning them into murderers, Quinn is a murderer who loves the fact that war gives him an opportunity to kill with impunity. The leaden glare when he discovers a discarded spike-rippled club under a German carcass is one of the most chilling moments of the film and leads to possibly the films most violent scene, a slow torture with that same blunt instrument. Indeed, his progression from bit part to genuine performance is pretty representative of the steep learning curve that Michael Bassett shows as a director scene-on-scene.
Bassett's debut performs an impressive u-turn, from its opening moments, consistently improving scene on scene. It's actually a slightly more complex issue even than that. It is one film (a war movie) that converts, subtly, into another (a horror movie) and both have weak, even flawed beginnings. The first scenes, depicting a night assault on enemy lines, do seem to have come from war re-enactor central casting. Although far more impressive than the slightly am-dram British Somme drama The Trench, it still looks like a bunch of guys in well-made imitation uniforms running across a farm somewhere in Wales, rather desperate, half-starved victims stuck on a shell-shredded wasteland. When the squad are introduced, they are definitely from central casting: the cowardly rookie, the dower but committed sergeant, the upper-class and incompetent captain who cracks under pressure, the unit psycho, the doom-predicting Scot, the seen-it-all medic, the sleazy greaseball and the religious one whose faith, you just know, is going to get tested by the absence of God in this hell hole. Yup, pretty much all the bases covered there. However, as the story evolves and they all become broken-down, paranoid and despairing, and the soaking, corpse-riddled set becomes ever-more oppressive, the sense of the misery and cruelty of war becomes more apparent. Even if he had not intended so, Bassett, in these moments, has made probably the strongest British-made World War One trench drama: ironic, as it's as much due to a lack of competition as to the quality of his work here. Considering the Western Front was primarily manned by British troops, it has never been a favored topic of British film makers, possibly because it is still regarded as too horrific, too fresh a psychic scar. Bassett's making a horror movie anyway, so there's no reason he shouldn't show the state of the trenches in all their gore-splattered truth.
Equally, the advent of the horror chapter of the film is fumbling. The first death at the hands of the force within the trench is surprisingly weakly played, sliding from an impressive example of corpse make-up that will make the weak-stomached a tad queasy, into an unshocking moment of shock. However, just as Bassett finds his feet with the war sequences, he quickly becomes adept with the mechanics of psychological and physical horror.
He does, undoubtedly, manage to make both movies very well indeed, by keying straight into the central terror of both. There has probably never been a better depiction of just how disgusting, harsh and cruel the trenches of the Great War were: everything is slimy, muddy, rat-infested and cold. It actually looks like the actors were at work in an open sewer, which is a fair approximation of the truth. While earlier movies like Gallipoli and All Quiet On The Western Front managed to recreate the sense of oppressiveness closeness and danger, Deathwatch imbues every scene with a feeling of corruption, dankness and disease. Hypothermia, not being shot at, is the real enemy here. That the enemy, whatever it is, uses these very tools, the barbed wire, the mud, the terror and the rats, to deal with the soldiers, is what makes it cruelest.
In part, Deathwatch succeeds because it takes a narrative step that some find annoying, some find to be a bit of a bullet dodge. The nature of whatever it is in the trench is never fully explained: hints, ideas, suggestions, theories will be rife, but it remains nameless. Whether it is God or the Devil in that muddy pit never is left to the audience.
RMW