The War Zone

Haunting movie, with a subject that will have you cringing, or crying. Wonderfully cast, great setting, and the background music fits like another cast member.

A young family moves from London to a remote country house. The young son suspects that his sister and his father's relationship is more than it should be. As he looks more and more into it he finds a sinister element that his mother does not see.

This was Tim Roth's directorial debut and he certainly wasn't looking for a popcorn hit. The story by Alexander Stuart from his own novel is very slow and deliberate but is ruthlessly effective. At first the whole family seems to have a strange sexual edge to it - the mother breast feeds in full view, the teenage brother and sister lie naked in front of each other etc. It gives things a strange feel but it's quickly forgotten when you get used to it. The guts of the story revolves around the father's sexual abuse of his daughter Jessie, who no longer fights but accepts it as part of her life. Some of the scenes - in particular ‘the scene' - are too hard to watch and the whole thing is very powerful. The film develops slowly and does not allow the father to be a monster-type (the British media have a habit of demonising people rather than taking objective views). Here the film doesn't let him become a caricature even when his crimes come to light.

The cast are roundly brilliant. Winston plays it perfectly all the way and doesn't take the `monster' route. Freddie Cunliffe is excellent as Tom - although all he has to do is mope around the place. Lara Belmont is outstanding - this must have been so difficult to play but she is absolutely excellent throughout. Swinton is good as the mother, but her character is not well used or developed.

Overall it's very hard to watch. Roth's direction is a little too clever but is very good generally. A powerful story very well told - but it may not be to everyone's liking.

Well yes this film does portray a rather taboo subject, probably the first one I have seen with incest in. But my god this is a great film. All of the actors are incredible, Ray Winstone is a fine actor and so are the two children, the boy Tom is excellent, when he finds out what his dad is doing he is completely cold to him, what he does to him at the end of the movie is understandable.

This is a very gritty film quite slow as well but it needs to be I think to give a harsh account of the family. The scene of the actual incest will be very disturbing for some, their is quite a lot of nudity in this film from most of the actors, also there is a lot of swearing ad violence too.

I think this film is harrowing at first but after all things like this happen in real life and I think Tim Roth has done a great job of portraying a touchy subject to film.

Strange, opaque and deeply unsettling, the War Zone is the only way a film about a topic as horrifying as incest should be. Tim Roth, realizing that the family of the film is too far gone to elicit much empathy from the audience, simply tries to convey the story as truthfully as possible. With crushing results.

At the beginning of the film, we're introduced to a nameless clan: a genial father (Ray Winstone), a mother exhausted from recently giving birth (Tilda Swinton), a sullen teenage boy (Freddie Cunliffe), and his strikingly beautiful older sister (Lara Belmont). All four have recently moved from London to the remote, seaside village of Devon, leaving the two kids feeling isolated and adrift.

What follows for the next hour or so is a brilliantly confusing experience--Roth presents a series of odd quirks about the family that makes the audience question what is merely eccentricity and what hints at something darker. Why, for example, does the family walk around naked most of the time? Don't those siblings seem slightly too "affectionate" given that they're teenagers? What exactly does the boy see his father doing with his sister in the bathroom that bothers him so? All of this mystery leads up to an absolutely harrowing scene which leaves no mystery as to the dynamic between father and daughter. More emotionally explicit than physically so, the scene is rightfully regarded as one of cinema's more horrible acts of on-screen violence, yet doesn't feel gratuitous in the slightest.

This film is as sparse as possible, with almost no inflection or melodramatic effects. Scenes are generally shot in long takes with a static camera (gorgeously framed in widescreen). There is little excess dialogue, and almost no music. Often we are placed into the middle of confusing scenes that are open to numerous interpretations. We more or less have to come to our own conclusions about what is going on. The teenagers are as inexpressive and introspective as teenagers in real life, which makes there unexpected emotional outbursts all the more powerful.

Why Roth hasn't made any other films is beyond me. He has a lean, cinematic sensibility which is unmatched by any other actor-director. I hope he gets an opportunity to use it again soon.

A melancholic boy faces the prospects of adapting to life in a craggy, rugged English countryside separated from the London he knows. We soon discover things are going to go from bad to worse. "The War Zone" is a special film about incest taken entirely from the perspective of the teenage son, Tom, and his sister, Jessie, giving it a quality of children versus their parents. Incest has been broached before in other films like "Celebration" and "The Sweet Hereafter" but never with such all encompassing realism as "The War Zone". You feel like a voyeur prying in other people's business. Director Tim Roth presents scene after scene of stark, uninviting, seashore landscapes as well as a mesmerizing movie score that vacillates between rushed crescendos and unnerving calm to give "The War Zone" a cold, somber tenseness. The acting is outstanding but Freddie Cunliffe as Tom and Lara Belmont as Jessie carry the film with their brave, demanding portrayals. Tom must weigh the secret he knows with preserving the stability of the home. He is so perplexed about normal love and the mere act of lust that when he comes upon attractive neighbor, Lucy and the set-up vixen, Carol, he becomes stupefied rather than attracted to them. Jessie must walk a fine line between the sex act she craves and her sense of right and wrong. Indeed, at one point, we sympathize with her less because she doesn't seem to mind her predicament. "The War Zone" ends in a way some will find unsatisfying but it is very consistent with the film's theme - lost children who will never find their way back.