#119: Deathwatch

Deathwatch

MJ Bassett
Initial release: December 6, 2002 (UK)

It's not exactly correct to say that there aren't very many World War I movies — IMDB says there's a little over thousand — but compared to World War II, it's almost five to one in World War II's favor. (It's an even starker ratio in video games: Mobygames suggests 214 World War I games, and a whopping 1275 for World War II.) There's a lot of reasons for this, ranging from the trite belief that trench warfare is boring to the more cogent argument that the war was a generally pointless crash of empires resulting in the meaningless deaths of millions, but the end result is that there's altogether fewer World War I horror films as well: a whopping 14. (If you're wondering, World War II gets 126.) MJ Bassett aimed to fill this gap with Deathwatch.

The rundown: A British squad goes over the top in a nighttime assault. After a gas attack by the Germans, the squad find themselves stranded far from the battlefield in fog-shrouded daylight. Eventually they find themselves in an abandoned German trench, but it soon becomes clear there's something deeply wrong, and little by little madness and death begin to set in as the squad, one by one, must confront their own demons. 

I have a soft spot for Bassett. Part of it is, of course, that she's a trans woman who frequently works with properties with fandoms hostile to her very existence. (Male nerds, I'm talking about male nerds.) But part of it also that I think she's actually a very talented genre filmmaker who gets a lot of unfair treatment from angry fandoms and snobby critics. Everyone hated Silent Hill Revelation, but I thought it was better than the first Silent Hill movie from Cristophe Gans (the guy who did that execrable Brotherhood of the Wolf) by a country mile. Solomon Kane I thought was pretty good too, and I'm hearing good things about Red Sonja. But before all of that, Deathwatch was her breakout film, and my introduction to Bassett. It's one of her best movies, and however you may feel about Silent Hill Revelation, it's easy to see how she got the Silent Hill license.

Bassett's resume is surprisingly short given how long she's been working in the industry; part of this, of course, is that much of her later film work has been less than successful. The big one would have to be Silent Hill: Revelation, a critical flop that put her filmmaking career into a bit of a tailspin, driving her to work in television for a few years, where she has credits on everything from Altered Carbon to Ash vs. Evil Dead. If you were disappointed in Silent Hill: Revelation (and I don't know why you would be, it's exactly what you would expect from a Hollywood adaptation of Silent Hill) you might want to take a look at Deathwatch. Bassett has given us a deeply unsettling nightmare of a film that centers on themes of paranoia, innocence, and cowardice. As the squad slowly begins to come apart at the seams, the only one keeping his shit together is the young teen who lied about his age and got more than he bargained for. (Said young teenager is played by a nearly fetal Jamie Bell, who I swear looked the spitting image of Tom Holland in 2002.)

Deathwatch is proof of what you can do with a low budget: shot almost entirely in muddy, filthy trenches, with limited (but pretty decent) CGI to augment a majority of purely practical effects, it's a solid deconstruction on the classic trope of tight-knit squads and cheery World War I-era Tommies. Nearly everyone in this squad is a psychopath or an asshole or both, especially Quinn, played by none other than Andy Serkis (who seems to relish playing roles where he's some kind of psycho or asshole. Or both.)

François Truffaut might have been mostly right about war movies, but in the post-9/11 world that this movie released in, Deathwatch feels like important commentary that remains relevant even now.

-june❤