Warfare (2025)

Warfare arrives with a stopwatch and no interest in explaining itself. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland reconstruct a single afternoon in Ramadi on 19 November 2006, drawn from the testimonies of the SEALs who lived it, and the film moves in real time. There is no narrator to hold our hand, no title card instructing us how to feel about the Iraq War, no third act in which somebody learns a lesson. A grenade comes through a window. The camera does not blink.

The cultural furniture we have come to expect from a war picture is largely absent. The ensemble is diverse in the unremarkable way of a real platoon, with D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai carrying the Mendoza role and Middle Eastern actors playing the interpreters and the family sheltering downstairs, but nobody pauses to announce the significance. There is no romance, no feminist counterpoint, no sermon on the military-industrial complex. A Deadline critic dismissed the whole enterprise as naked propaganda. That is its own kind of review, and it also tells you the film has no interest in flattering anybody's politics.

Something quieter lingers. Farid and Sidar, the Iraqi interpreters, are sent out the door first, ahead of the Americans, and Farid does not survive the decision. The film registers this without commentary, letting the expendability of local allies sit there unexamined. That is either restraint or avoidance, and it never clarifies which. The result is harrowing and technically immaculate, with almost nothing to say about the present moment beyond the observation that war is loud and people die in it. The sommelier would call it a clean, austere vintage. No additives.