’71

Hav­ing already been put through the wringer this year in direc­tor David Mackenzie’s sen­sa­tion­al, gru­elling prison dra­ma Starred Up, Jack O’Connell finds him­self nav­i­gat­ing a new hell in first-time direc­tor Yann Demange’s authen­ti­cal­ly grit­ty take on The Trou­bles. If there’s a more excit­ing British male lead under 30 out there right now, we haven’t seen him.

O’Connell plays pri­vate Gary Hook, who enlists in the hope of see­ing action abroad but instead is deployed to North­ern Ire­land at the height of the ter­ri­to­r­i­al con­flict. His reg­i­ment might be sit­u­at­ed just a stone’s throw from where they’ve been assigned to keep the peace, but when Hook and his fel­low new recruits are dropped from the back of an Army truck onto the rub­bled streets of Belfast, the sanc­tu­ary of the bar­racks feels a world away.

As his unit retreats fol­low­ing a bodged house raid, Hook is sep­a­rat­ed and sub­se­quent­ly left behind. Caught behind ene­my lines, his sur­vival instinct kicks in and the film shifts focus from the cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly famil­iar back­drop of civ­il unrest and para­mil­i­tary hos­til­i­ty to track Hook’s move­ments over the course of a long, har­row­ing night. Hav­ing nar­row­ly evad­ed his would-be cap­tors, Hook dis­cards his uni­form in favour of less con­spic­u­ous civvies.

This is the first instance of Demange and screen­writer Gre­go­ry Burke’s recur­ring use of anti-war metaphor. In lit­er­al­ly strip­ping Hook of his mil­i­tary guise, he becomes just anoth­er scared boy play­ing sol­dier in the name of a cause he doesn’t ful­ly under­stand. As the human face of the ​‘long war’, O’Connell is per­fect­ly cast: he is by turns tough and vul­ner­a­ble, equal­ly con­vinc­ing as an aggres­sor and vic­tim. This is not a his­to­ry les­son but more a sto­ry of one young man’s edu­ca­tion, and O’Connell, in yet anoth­er demand­ing lead­ing role, absolute­ly nails it.

Despite its incen­di­ary sub­ject mat­ter, this is not an overt­ly polit­i­cal film but rather a study of the per­son­al cost of war, of the tragedy of inno­cence snatched away by the hands of dan­ger­ous, manip­u­la­tive men. A nail-bit­ing­ly tense set piece cen­tred on the con­ceal­ment of a nail bomb in the back­room of a dingy pub is the most vis­cer­al exam­ple of this, but there are many others.

Hav­ing been pulled fur­ther into this night­mare sce­nario, and now bear­ing the unmis­tak­able signs of phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al com­bat-induced trau­ma, Hook becomes embroiled in an under­cov­er plot that sees both his squadron and the cir­cling Pro­vo youth — played with indoc­tri­nat­ed men­ace by Mar­tin McCann, Kil­lian Scott and Bar­ry Keoghan — inten­si­fy­ing their search for him.

With nowhere left to run, Hook is forced into a des­per­ate stand­off sit­u­a­tion on a grim tow­er block estate, where the film’s messy inter­nal pol­i­tics return to the fore in unsat­is­fy­ing­ly gris­ly fash­ion. The tacked-on orphan back­sto­ry that book­ends ​’71 fur­ther dulls the impact of the end­ing, but this remains an impres­sive debut fea­ture buoyed by a cap­ti­vat­ing cen­tral turn.