SONGS OF WAR

Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists angrily free of his mother’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and tears off down the platform.

- JUSTIN CHANG

Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan star in Steve McQueen's film.

Rita, distraught, tries in vain to say a proper good-bye, knowing that they might never see each other again. It’s 1940, German bombs are falling across the city, and George is being evacuated to the countryside, as millions of English children will be in the course of the war. His bitter resentment at this upheaval is startling, even in the annals of Second World War cinema, where fraught farewells in crowded train stations abound.

You may recall another boy telling his mother “I hate you” on a railway platform, though with a mitigating tenderness in his voice. So began “Au Revoir les Enfants” (1987), Louis Malle’s sobering account of his coming of age in Nazi-occupied France. For “Hope and Glory” (1987), the director John Boorman drew on intimate memories of a Blitz-ravaged childhood, with improbably buoyant results; the mother in that film pulled her children back from the train, unable to let them go. But Steve McQueen, the writer and director of “Blitz,” is not making a memoir. He was born more than two decades after V-E Day and raised in London’s burgeoning West Indian community—the rich inspiration for his five-part film anthology, “Small Axe” (2020). While researching that project, McQueen discovered a wartime photograph of a young Black boy with an oversized suitcase. Who was this child, and what became of him? “Blitz” imagines an answer.