‘Warfare’ movie review: Kit Connor and Will Poulter star in a harrowing tale of life and death on the battlefield 

Warfare immerses viewers in the chaos of battle, showcasing the harsh realities of war with intense sound design.

Two songs bookend Warfare — Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ and Low’s ‘Dancing and Blood’. The rest, however, is far from silence as one’s ears are assailed by screams of the grievously injured, the blast of grenades and IEDs, thundering of low-flying planes in a show of force, and staccato bursts of gunfire and electronic communication.

In 2006, Ramadi, Iraq, the Navy SEAL team, Alpha One, is enjoying lovely ladies doing their naughty aerobics routine in the music video of ‘Call on Me.’ Alpha One heads out to take control of a two-storey building to surveil a marketplace across the street. The team learns of the two families living in the building and with the help of translators, Farid (Nathan Altai) and Noor (Donya Hussen), herd the families into a room and tell them to keep low and silent.

Ray Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), is the communications officer in touch with drones about their position, while the sniper, Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) warily watches the seemingly innocent comings and goings across the street.

Things suddenly go very wrong as they usually do on the knife-edge of battle. A grenade through a window, an IED at the gate, critically injured men, and a shell-shocked commanding officer, little more than a boy himself, Erik (Will Poulter) seems a recipe for disaster.

As poet James Kirkup says in ‘No Men Are Foreign,’ beneath all uniforms a single body breathes. It is the secret that poor, whimpering Snowden spit on the aircraft floor in Joseph Heller’s savage anti-war satire Catch-22, and it is the same secret that a soldier spills on the dusty ground in Ramadi.

The ensemble cast, which includes Noah Centineo and Charles Melton, move as a well-oiled machine underlining their brotherhood in blood. The sound department needs a special shout out as it solidly contributes to the immersive experience from the sniper softly expelling a held breath to the screaming terror of the shrieking planes, lending an other-wordly beauty to the carnage below.

One cannot describe Warfare, written by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, based on the former’s experiences during the Iraq war, as entertaining and it is not meant to be. War involves real people, who break and bleed in theatres across the world, for ideology, ego or cold commerce.