M. J. Bassett’s debut feature film,Deathwatch, received only a very limited release (several film festivals, then straight to DVD) when it first came out in 2002. Additionally, it garneredpredominantly negative reviewsand still holds adismal 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As a result, thisBritish horrorisn’t as widely recognized as it deserves, despite the fact that itfeatures a bunch of great performancesby such actors asJamie BellandAndy Serkis. Not only was it one of the scariest films to emerge in the early aughts,it also remains the most effective horror film set in the middle of the WWI trenches, even more than two decades after its premiere. And it’s not only a sufficiently grim atmosphere and the scenes of gnarly kills that make it so effective. It’s the way the war isn’t just a setting in this story — it’s the monster in it.
The Routine Reality of the War Exposes Its Horrors
The war setting isn’t unique in the horror genre, and wasn’t unheard of in 2002 either. Just a year prior,Rob Greene’sThe Bunkerwas released, featuring a similar plot but involving a group of German soldiersduring WW2. However, while Greene’s filmonly significantly picks up speed in its final part,Deathwatchstarts fizzing brightly — quite literally — during the opening credits. The story unfolds during a cold, miserable spring in 1917 when a company of British soldiers becomes lost after a chaotic, unfortunate charge and later discovers a mostly abandoned German dugout. The Brits, led by inexperienced Captain Jennings (Laurence Fox), quickly capture one of the German soldiers left there and decide to secure the trenches.
The 18 Best War-Horror Movies, Ranked
The horrors of war take a whole new meaning in these movies.
There, enveloped in a thick fog that seems to conceal a powerful supernatural entity,the men quickly begin to go insane, turning on each other and resorting to violence. But not before we get to see and feel something that isn’t often showcased inclassic war films—the mundane, numbing dullness of the war. It’snot all battles and going down in the blaze of glory. Instead, it’s going around in circles with no clear destination, sitting for days guarding what amounts to mud, and slowly dying surrounded by no one but eager flies. Even the rain — this incredibly cinematic occurrence that can make anything look aesthetic and dramatic — falls down repeatedly inDeathwatchjust to produce more mud for the characters to crawl through.
There’s No Barricading Against the Evil in ‘Deathwatch’
One of the film’s most notable features is the combination ofgraphic realism(the above-mentioned mud, the flies, the rats, etc.) andsurreal elements. The dominating colors are gloomy shades of gray, brown, and red,creating a dense atmosphere of impeding, hopeless doom. The fact that death surrounds the characters isn’t simply implied here.Images of death are everywhere, in almost every shot, as most of the action takes place in the trenches that resemble an endless labyrinth filled with the dead bodies of German soldiers. The pile of those bodies that the Brits create at some point isno less grotesquethan the blood that starts oozing from the ground, a red mist chasing people around or animated barbed wire.
Of course, it’s people’s desensitized reaction to the surrounding horrors that interests the authors the most. In a particularly memorable episode, one of the soldiers played byKris Marshall(the futureColin, god of sexfromLove Actually) starts masturbating, not all perturbed by the corpses lying somewhere nearby. Allthe characters get tested by the reality of war, but it’s only 16-year-old Charlie Shakespeare (played by Bell) who questions its absurdity. At some point, he openly wonders why they keep up with an activity they all know is senseless, led by a man who loses his mind, crushed by the weight of the responsibility he is not up for. The company’s doctor, Fairweather (Matthew Rhys), has no sensible reply beyond claiming that this is just the order of things.
The characters inDeathwatchtry to hold on to the shreds of that order — their religion, their knowledge, their violent tendencies (in the case of Andy Serkis' character), the military rankings andthe class hierarchy. All of which proves to be their undoing because of the nature ofthe film’s villain — the very thing that makes it so effectively macabre. It isn’t amalevolent spirit, a demon, or some vengeful evil dead(all of those employed as in the war horror subgenre at one point or another). The thing hiding in the fog and making the ground bleed isthe very essence of the bloody worldwide massacre instigated by men, the embodiment of war itself. Barbed wire might be a very effective killer, but most of the atrocious acts of violence inDeathwatchare still committed by people.
Deathwatch
