The War Zone | Recap and Analysis |

Warning: This article contains major spoilers and discusses disturbing material.

For a reason unbeknownst even to myself, I love disturbing movies. I spend many weeknights seeking out the most skin-crawling, nightmare-inducing stuff I can find, hoping it will scare me far into the next morning. I like the feeling of being unsettled, disjointed, and I thrive on the shocking sensation of seeing something so shocking and distressing that I know I will never, ever forget it.

The War Zone is shocking. It is distressing. It is one of the single most intrusive films I’ve ever sat through – nightmarish not in any ghostly imagery or graphic violence, but in the very real knowledge that its contents are truthful, threatening, and ever-present.

It tells the story of a working-class English family, who recently moved from London to Devon, where the clouds strangle the sun and rain falls constantly from the sky. Dad (Ray Winstone) is an exuberant extrovert who caters to his family, and we get the idea that he works hard and well. Mom (Tilda Swinton), heavily pregnant, loves her children selflessly and is preparing their household for a new baby. Eldest daughter Jessie (Lara Belmont) is an assistive help to her mother, close to her brother, and seemingly welcoming of the newest edition to the family. And son Tom (Freddie Cunliffe), while sullen and broody due to the recent move (evidently unwanted, at least by him), seems to hold a solid relationship with each member of his family. The picture looks pretty in the first fifteen minutes or so of the film, after which things take a sudden, steep downturn.

The child is born, a healthy baby girl named Alice, but things are far from cheerful in the household. Very quickly, we get the haunting indication that something is not right. Jessie and Tom seem close, but their relationship bears some oddities, most markedly indicated in the family’s overall lack of concern with nudity. Dad walks around the house stark naked on one occasion, with no one put off by his behavior. Mom sits at the kitchen table breastfeeding Alice, but leaves her entire chest exposed after the baby has been taken away, while she sits casually with her teenage son and family friend, Lucy (Kate Ashfield). Tom peers into his parents’ room one night and watched as his father strokes and fondles his mother, who’s dressed in nothing but underwear and a nursing bra. He’s perfectly at ease talking with Jessie on her bed; they’re both shirtless and she’s without a bra, every inch of her body visible from the waist up.

Maybe it’s a cultural thing, I thought as I watched, disconcerted but unsure of where it was all leading. To my knowledge, it wasn’t commonplace for families to walk around naked in England, but maybe I was wrong? Any uncertainty faded quickly, though, as the questionable strangeness transformed into full-blown dysfunction. Tom witnesses something disturbing through the bathroom window, but we aren’t let it on the secret until he confronts Jessie about it later. “I saw you in the bath with Dad,” he says. She denies it, giving her boyfriend Nick (played by a before-fame Colin Farrell) as proof. Why would she want old Dad when she can have a nice, attractive boy her age? But Tom’s worst fears are confirmed when he finds nude photos of Dad and Jess together, and his world is thrown smoothly and rapidly upside-down.

The aforementioned nude photos, along with a prolonged, horrifically graphic scene where Jessie is violently raped by her father, are the only two visual instances we get that anything deviant is occurring. As a result, The War Zone feels less like a movie about incest, and more like a picture of what it does to a family. The characters are the life and breath of this story, and it’s our concern, repulsion, and fear for them that moves everything along, as opposed to any major plot devices. We are shown a broken young girl, too degraded and ashamed to vocalize what is happening to her; and though she doesn’t seem to want any of it, she still faces the judgement of her brother, who is disgusted with both Jessie and their father when he finds out. He repeatedly threatens to tell their mother, but doesn’t, for some unspoken reason. He begs her to stop her sexual relationship with their dad, but she doesn’t, for another unspoken reason. Their mother, aware that her children are unhappy but not knowing the reason why, tries to connect with them, but is ultimately clueless as to what’s going on behind the scenes. The family loops through a seemingly endless cycle of talking, of not talking, of seeing, of being blind. No one understands exactly what is happening, and no one knows how to find out.

It all comes to a head when the family rushes baby Alice to the hospital one night. She’s crying incessantly and seems to be in pain, but no one can tell what’s wrong with her. Dad and Jess go home, and Tom goes into the hospital room, where Mom is sitting and watching over Alice. She knows something is wrong, but he won’t tell her anything. Alice begins to cry, and when Mom goes to soothe her, we see there is blood in her diaper, seemingly caused by some sort of genital injury. It’s the single piece of stomach-churning evidence that assures both Tom and the viewer that Dad’s abuse has not been limited to Jessie alone, and it’s enough to finally convince Tom to warn his mother. He tells her not to trust his father, and not to let him anywhere near the baby.

Instead of giving her any further information, he goes back home, where Dad has evidently been told that he isn’t allowed back into the hospital, and that his wife is contacting the police and doesn’t want to see him. (We’re left unsure about this sudden change in character, how and why Mom so quickly came to the realization that something was very wrong despite Tom giving her little to no information. One can only wonder if, in some disgraced, terrified corner of her mind, she has known something for quite some time that she’s never wanted to believe.) He accuses Tom of being the reason behind it, and Tom reveals his knowledge of his dad and Jess’s relationship. It causes Dad to spiral into a violent episode, hitting and pushing Tom around the house while Jess sits to the side, shaking and weeping with her arms covering her head.

Dad finally storms out in a rage, and Jessie goes upstairs to Tom’s room, where he asks her to stay with him. After everyone involved has seemingly cooled down a bit, Tom takes a knife from the kitchen and goes with Jessie to his father’s bedroom. Dad is remarkably calmer, but unsurprisingly, less than apologetic. When Jess asks him, coldly and tearfully, why he raped her, he rejects her and scolds Tom for placing such sordid ideas into his sister’s mind. “You see how you can put things in people’s heads?” he lectures with a tone of disgust. After he insinuates in no uncertain terms that the abuse will extend to Tom next, Tom stabs him in the gut with the kitchen knife and rushes out of the room. Jessie stands still, sobbing, watching her father bleed out on the floor.

In the final scene, Jessie goes outside their house to see her brother sitting, alone and distraught. “What are we gonna do?” he asks her. She doesn’t have an answer. The camera pans slowly away from them, over the endless, gray waters of Devon, and the screen cuts to black.

The ending, slow and melancholy, doesn’t provide us with much in the way of answers. We don’t know what will happen to Tom and Jessie, or to their mother, or to little Alice. We don’t know what kind of legal issues they’ll run into with the murder of their father. We don’t know how Mom will react to the horrific news of her husband being an abuser. But, in the grand scale of the story’s events, these details are meaningless to us. What matters isn’t what will happen, but what has already happened. Multiple lives have been collectively destroyed, forever changed by the actions of one previously trusted man. Director Tim Roth’s personal history of familial sexual abuse shines powerfully clear in this depiction of loss; it shows us what can happen when one powerful person in our lives, someone intended to protect, to defend, to provide, chooses instead to hurt, maim, and destroy. It is not a cautionary tale, or even an awareness piece on the horrors of incest – it is a story of family dysfunction, isolation, and pain, and a reminder that monsters really do exist.