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THE WAR ZONE Send This Review to a Friend
We've seen Tim Roth's skill as an actor. With "The War Zone" he has turned to directing, and he makes an impressive debut with a depressing story convincingly told. It is clear that Roth doesn't believe in grand flourishes. His film, with a screenplay by Alexander Stuart based on his novel, unflinchingly explores incest. The family in question lives in a dreary, isolated spot in Devon and the austere mood and muted cinematography match the tragic subject.
Roth has assembled an excellent cast. Freddie Cunliffe plays Tom, an emotionally pent-up, pimply 15-year-old who is lonely after the family moves to the countryside from London. His 17-year-old sister Jessie (Lara Belmont) has a terrible secret. She is being sexually abused by their father (Ray Winstone), and Tom has found the trysting place, an abandoned concrete structure overlooking the sea. He peeks through an opening and photographs what he sees. The father's favorite method is anal intercourse, during which Jessie cries helplessly.
What should Tom do? Tell his mother (Tilda Swinton)? His parents also have a new baby, born on a country road at the outset of the film when the car in which they are rushing to the hospital overturns.
The mother, running the household and preoccupied with her infant, has no inkling of her husband's betrayal. The set-up is a prescription for disaster, and by the very tone of the film we know it will come. To Roth's credit, he films the explicit scenes with vivid but understated intensity that accentuates the pain that an audience is meant to feel at the sorry spectacle. There is no sensationalism. The warped family life into which Roth transports us is grim and pathetic, all the more so because we know such situations exist throughout the world. A Lot 47 Films release.
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