Dunkirk (2017) Review: Survival Against the Clock

Is Dunkirk worth watching?

Yes. Dunkirk is a relentless, beautifully engineered survival film that makes the 1940 evacuation feel less like history than like an emergency happening in real time. Christopher Nolan strips the war film down to sound, image and suspense, and the result is exhausting in the best way. The reservation is deliberate but real: the characters are sketched so lightly that the film can feel emotionally distant, more an experience than a story.

What is Dunkirk about?

In late May 1940, hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers are trapped on the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk in northern France, surrounded by the German army and waiting for ships that may not come. Dunkirk follows the evacuation from three angles: young soldiers trying to get off the beach, a civilian sailor (Mark Rylance) steering his small boat across the Channel to help, and RAF pilots, including one played by Tom Hardy, defending the rescue from the air.

Fionn Whitehead plays the private at the centre of the beach story, with Kenneth Branagh as a naval officer on the mole, the long breakwater where troops queue for rescue. Cillian Murphy appears as a shell-shocked soldier pulled from the sea, and Barry Keoghan and Harry Styles take smaller roles. Nolan wrote and directed this British production, which is in English and runs a lean 107 minutes.

Three clocks running at once

The film’s defining idea is its structure. The beach story unfolds over a week, the voyage over a day, and the air combat over an hour, and Nolan cuts between them so that the timelines gradually converge. It is a puzzle-box device borrowed from his more cerebral films, but here it serves pure tension: the audience is always aware that time is running out in three different ways.

The approach does ask something of viewers. Early on, the same moment can appear twice from different perspectives, and anyone expecting a conventional chronology may lose their bearings briefly. Once the pattern clicks, it becomes the film’s great engine.

Sound and image as storytelling

Dunkirk is one of the most physical war films ever made. Shot largely on large-format film, it fills the screen with grey sea, endless sand and tiny figures, and the aerial sequences place the audience inside a cramped cockpit with no score to cushion the danger. The enemy is barely seen; the threat arrives as the scream of a diving plane or the sudden hammer of bullets through a hull.

Hans Zimmer’s score, built around a relentless ticking pulse and rising tones that never seem to resolve, keeps the tension at a near-constant pitch. The film’s Academy Awards for editing and sound were well deserved, since those two crafts do most of the storytelling.

Faces instead of backstories

There is very little dialogue and almost no exposition. Nobody explains their family, their hometown or their hopes; the film trusts faces and actions instead. Rylance is the quiet moral centre, a decent man doing a dangerous job without fuss, and Hardy manages to convey an entire character with only his eyes above an oxygen mask. Murphy’s trembling, frightened soldier is the film’s sharpest portrait of what combat does to the mind.

The cost of this approach is intimacy. The young soldiers on the beach are hard to tell apart, which is partly the point, but it means some viewers will admire the film more than they feel it. The patriotic uplift in the closing stretch also lands more softly than Nolan seems to intend.

Who should watch Dunkirk?

It is ideal for anyone who loves suspense, admirers of Nolan’s craft, and war film fans who want immersion rather than a history lesson. At 107 minutes it is Nolan’s shortest feature since his debut, and it rewards the biggest screen and loudest sound system you can find. The violence is intense and constant but not gory, with drowning and air attacks more frightening than graphic; it is suitable for older teenagers.

Where to go next from Nolan’s filmography:

• Oppenheimer, his later wartime history, far talkier and more interested in the mind of one man.
• Interstellar, which shares Dunkirk’s obsession with time and its overwhelming use of sound and score.

The verdict

Dunkirk is a war film of rare technical control, a thriller built from ticking clocks, roaring engines and cold water. Its characters are thin by design, which keeps it from being a complete emotional experience, but as a feat of suspense filmmaking it has few equals.

Rating: 4/5