“Blitz,” set in London during World War II, might technically be Steve McQueen ’s first war movie. But struggle and survival has long marked the filmmaker’s tough and tortured work. No matter the circumstance — slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the 1960s-1980s London of West Indian immigrants in “Small Axe,” the Irish hunger strike of “Shame” — McQueen has been drawn to moments of history less for their dramatic extremes than for how they test the morality of those in and around the fight.
Did they turn a blind eye? Did they risk themselves? Do we remember? McQueen’s films tend to ask questions — often uncomfortable ones. That’s been true in his nonfiction work, too. His 2023 short film “Grenfell” captured the aftermath of the tragic Grenfell Tower blaze.
Last year’s “Occupied City” compared present-day street addresses in Amsterdam to what happened in those precise locations during the Nazi occupation of WWII. In that film, McQueen juxtaposed past and present, death and life, and some of the same collisions are found in the 1940-set “Blitz,” which opened Friday in theaters and streams Nov. 22 on Apple TV+.
It’s told largely from the perspective of a 9-year-old boy, George (Elliott Heffernan), whose single mother, Rita (a steely Saoirse Ronan ), has made the anguished decision to send him to the countryside with thousands of other schoolchildren fleeing the Blitz. A year into the war, the bombing is already intense, and so is the que.
