I have a fixed idea of what a war film is, and that idea is mostly noise. Explosions, a swelling brass section, a man shouting an order over the din while the camera shakes. So when one got recommended to me for the third time by someone whose taste I trust, I agreed to watch it largely to stop being recommended it, and fully expecting to spend two hours politely waiting for it to end.
It wasn't that. The thing I'd braced for, the relentless noise, was barely in it. What the film is actually about, it turns out, is silence: the long stretches between the loud bits, where nothing is exploding and everyone is just waiting, and the waiting is the worst part. I'd assumed the genre was about action. This one was about dread, which is a much quieter and much harder thing to film.
There's a sequence maybe a third of the way in where, for several minutes, almost nothing happens. People sit. The wind moves some grass. You keep expecting the cut, the bang, the thing the genre has trained you to wait for, and it doesn't come, and the not-coming becomes unbearable in a way no explosion ever managed. That's the whole trick, I think. It withholds the noise you've been conditioned to expect, and the withholding does the work. By the time something does finally happen, you're so wound up that it lands like a slap.
I went in expecting to be bored by the quiet and bludgeoned by the loud, which is my lazy two-state model of the entire genre. What I got was a film where the quiet was the point and the loud was almost an afterthought, used sparingly and therefore properly. It made me realise how much of what I dislike about war films is really just the bad ones being loud because they've nothing else, and how rare it is to find one confident enough to sit still.
I'm not going to pretend it's converted me into a devotee of the genre. But it did the useful thing a good recommendation does, which is to break a category I'd lazily welded shut. "War film" was a label I used to skip things, and now I have to admit the label was hiding at least one film I'd have been sorry to miss. I'll grant the person who kept nagging me a quiet, grudging point. They were right, and I was wrong, and I'll be telling them so at length the next time I see them, because that's only fair.