It’s been almost two decades since the events of WARFARE took place in Ramadi, Iraq, in November 2006. “This film uses only their memories,” an opening title card informs us—right before we cut to a group of troops whooping and hollering at the highly sexualised aerobics in Eric Prydz’s Call on Me music video.
That clip, like the approach of co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, captures a fleeting moment in time. We’re dropped into a place and forced to watch events unfold in real time, with little context and no escape. The result is one of the most immediate depictions of combat in recent memory.
We never get particularly close to any of the soldiers, but the film follows a group of American Navy SEALs led by Erik (Will Poulter), their Officer in Charge. After seizing a civilian home as an observation post—and effectively taking the family inside hostage—they soon come under fire from insurgents.
WARFARE oscillates between quiet observation and overwhelming sound and fury. The first 20 minutes simply watches the watchers, close enough to see sweat drip from their pores. When that silence finally shatters, you may notice you’ve been holding your breath.
Once the attacks begin, it’s relentless. Mendoza, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who served in Iraq, ensures the combat mechanics feel brutally authentic. (He’s portrayed in the film by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, best known for his award-winning turn in Reservation Dogs.) The trials of moving from one room to the next, the agonising waiting, and the viscera lining the streets become the new normal.
David J. Thompson’s cinematography gives us just enough to work out what’s happening through context, but it’s the soundscape that takes WARFARE to another level. It engulfs you completely. And yet, it’s the absence of sound—the eerie, muffled ringing after an explosion—that’s most haunting. When it’s punctuated by the keening wails of a downed soldier, amid the frenetic collapse of a unit, it’s the definition of pure cinema.
Yet what does it all amount to? If WARFARE has a point to make about the senselessness of war—or of this war in particular—it’s buried in the text. Ahead of its release, there were concerns that it would downplay the atrocities committed by U.S. troops during the incursion. It doesn’t exactly do that, but it doesn’t condemn them either. If anything, its intimate framing encourages a centrist reading, much like Garland’s Civil War, or at least it would—if this well-funded army weren’t so often portrayed as the underdogs.
As for the men themselves, Mendoza and Garland offer little insight. When WARFARE closes on a series of comparative shots of the real soldiers, it’s hard not to notice that most of their faces are blurred. This is apparently standard practice for Navy SEALs, but it ultimately adds another layer of distance. So, for all its immediacy, even this film stops short of reckoning with the deeper consequences of this controversial conflict.
2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland | WRITERS: Ray Mendoza Alex Garland | CAST: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton | DISTRIBUTOR: A24 | RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 11 April 2025 (USA), 17 April 2025 (Australia)
