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Now given the excellent credentials that The War Zone presents, this is an unexpected conclusion. After all, debut director Tim Roth is a talented and dedicated actor, often demonstrating great empathy with his chosen roles. His cast consists of several well-respected figures, Ray Winstone as Dad and Tilda Swinton as Mum, together with a pair of bright young things. Alexander Stuart adapts the screenplay from his own novel; thus you'd expect him to be true to its published tone, if nothing else. Then, to light this potential, the story is shot on a wild and beautiful section of Devon coastline; an area that lends itself to tales of windswept devastation and tragic isolation.
Sadly the cast appears, in this incarnation, to have studied at the school of sparse words and furrowed brow. Roth's direction burdens us with numerous heavy silences, much refusing to answer straight questions and people shoving moodily past one another. It's a reasonable tactic to use once or twice, but oh so tedious when repeated ad nauseum. What dialogue exists is terse and impenetrable, the most believable asppect being the low-level small talk and general conversation. Winstone gives the liveliest performance in The War Zone, probably because his character has some emotional texture. The rest just look miserable without bothering to explain why they stand so distraught.
A significant factor here is that the film lacks a framework into which you can place the action and derive a context. All you have are rubbed-raw nerves, which shock but make little sense in the larger picture. So when The War Zone stumbles on scenes that by virtue of their brutality are physically uncomfortable, they seem unnecessarily graphic. In a better film these horrors might clarify the story, here they're coldly repulsive. Such a situation arises partly because there's no uncertainty, no chance for this to be a normal family and for the deviancy to exist only in Tom's (Freddie Cunliffe) fevered imagination. Clues to dysfunction are sprinkled liberally throughout, even before the acts are made visible, so Roth creates scant suspense. Anyway, if there was nothing up with Jessie (Lara Belmont) then the story really would be smoke and mirrors.
In the event, a sizeable number of threads and characters add negligibly to the story arc; it's challenging to see these as more than filler. Divorced from the core theme, these offshoots ensure that The War Zone seems to extend for an eternity. Yet it barely slips past the hour and a half mark; one may wonder why it crawls so. It's because the characters don't reveal much of themselves, of their inner thoughts and motivations. Hidden like this, in plain view, there are no hooks to evoke compassion from the audience. These family members are as distant from us as they are from each other, and that's a mighty big gap. At least photographer Seamus McGarvey captures the misery beautifully, from a limited palette of hues and shades. Thus Roth's conceit of having the characters lurk in shadow, and pools of light, succeeds.
One can imagine how effectively The War Zone would work as a play, where you're physically close to the family and can develop an empathy with their situation. Staging this story as a piece of cinema doesn't really act to enhance it, except for the unsympathetic Devonian scenery, and in some ways detracts. This is a shame because Roth and his cast absolutely want to impact upon the audience through low-key acting and sensitive direction. In a fashion they triumph, channelling your perception through Tom's incoherent comprehension and Jessie's epic self-loathing. The difficulty is that for much of the time The War Zone is unwatchable and not only because what's being portrayed is morally horrifying; often the film is just boring, begging you to fill its silent void with unwritten meaning. Sure, in the real world incest may never find a resolution, but this is no documentary (even if it looks like one).
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