A24’s Unbridled ‘Warfare’

Directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, “Warfare” is a real-time journal of bloodshed.

Set in Iraq in 2006, the film takes place within a single, residential home occupied by U.S. Navy SEALs under siege by Iraqi militants. Based purely on the memories of Mendoza (“The Warfighters,” “Live to Tell”) and his former SEAL colleagues, the film is a minute-by-minute chronicling of unsanitized devastation.

D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai stars as Mendoza’s younger self, alongside an ensemble including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton as dramatized counterparts to the real unit. Featuring sparse dialogue apart from battle commands and cries for help, “Warfare” characterizes its cast through each soldier’s expressions, actions and composure under pressure.

As co-director, Garland (“Civil War,” “Ex Machina”) takes a backseat from handling the narrative, instead focusing his sense of imagery on the cold, graphic details of violence. 

“Warfare” isn’t a film for the faint of heart. Alongside gut-wrenching gore effects, the film’s first act is eerily silent, but it turns concussive by the second act, with incessant gunfire, command shouts and screams from the wounded.

Mendoza, Garland and Poulter (“Death of a Unicorn,” “The Bear”) attended the Music Box Theatre’s Q&A screening March 16. Mendoza said the film was a documentation for his friend Elliott, a wounded member of the unit played by Jarvis (“Shōgun,” “Inside”), who has no recollection of the event.

“I remember what it looked like, the temperature — he does not,” Mendoza said. “That was hard, watching him be frustrated with that void in memory.”

Mendoza said “Warfare” was something he’d long thought of making, but didn’t have the opportunity to produce until working with Garland on “Civil War.” Mendoza said he hopes the film can bridge understanding between audiences and those in service to better comprehend armed combat.

“Most of us that are in combat service, we have to compartmentalize everything,” Mendoza said. “We push it down. You can’t really function when you think about it.”

Accuracy was crucial for chronicling the real, life-altering events experienced by servicemen, Mendoza said. Both he and Garland interviewed each unit member, changing some character names for the privacy of those still in service.

“I was not allowed to invent anything, nobody was allowed to give a note, nothing could appear in the script or in the film that wasn’t sourced exclusively from someone who was there,” Garland said. “As a writer, a lot of my job was listening — it was just listening to Ray and then interviewing other people who were involved.”

Playing the unit’s leader, Erik, Poulter said the reverence on set allowed the ensemble a window into their characters. Rather than falling into war film clichés, Poulter said he and the cast were pushed to not feel levelheaded or vulnerable — but to be unfocused.

“Our understanding of war and stories of this nature have been informed by a kind of Hollywood grammar,” Poulter said. “Certain instincts within us as actors kicked in, and it was to do one of two things — it was to panic and play the emotion of the moment or it was to try and look really slick and really professional.”

Poulter said despite three weeks of intensive training, the cast still subconsciously exuded sensationalized representations of war in their performances. It was only by acting by instinct that the actors avoided the trap of romanticization, Poulter said.

As the carnage unfolds, the protagonists of “Warfare” don’t respond with showy theatrics or thought-out plans. They’re confused and rely on a base sense of responsibility while adrenaline fogs their judgement. Personnel are jeopardized to retrieve equipment, improper first aid is delivered and strategic maneuvers are executed without oversight.

Some veterans Garland interviewed said they’re haunted by their choices and the instinctual decisions that jeopardized lives. Though the 95-minute movie took just five weeks to film, intimate and unrelenting scenes prolonged the dread.

“A sequence that takes half an hour with blood and screaming in a hallway lasts a week,” Garland said. “While Cosmo Jarvis was lying down with a very convincing prosthetic of brutally mangled legs and sticky, fake blood everywhere, Elliott — who he is playing — is 10 feet away, watching.”

The Trump administration is actively cutting 80,000 employees from the Veterans Affairs Administration, The Associated Press reported. Mendoza said with an absence of care, there’ll be a void in discussing veterans’ experiences and how to treat them — something he wants “Warfare” to guide.

“It ends up being organically an anti-war film because of the violence,” Mendoza said. “But there is no political message, other than I want it to be a conversation piece.”

“Warfare” is anything but a generous portrait of the American military experience. Its soldiers are mercilessly put through the meat grinder, their mission results in no material gains and incensed civilians berate them for forcing their presence upon them.

Garland said the biggest pitfall of military depictions is their seeming faultlessness. Though “Warfare” depicts the selflessness in its characters, the film still questions their impermeability and the larger military project.

“They’re mythologized by the media and by cinema and by comic books and video games, and they’re mythologized by themselves to an extent,” Garland said. “They’re under enormous stress and enormous pressure, and one of the things Ray and everyone did was allow us to see past the mythologizing.”

“Warfare” has more in common with a horror film than any war drama. Once the gunshots cease and the characters retreat from the screen, audiences will be left with the same burning question as the screaming wounded — “Why?”

“Warfare,” rated R, comes to theatres April 11.