Mark Kermode wasn’t lying or exaggerating in his review of Warfare: it is a harsh, brutal film, and one which is quite difficult to watch. The thing is, it’s also an extremely interesting piece of cinema. For one I’m not sure I would call it a film, at least in the contemporary post-classical Hollywood sense. There is no plot and very little character or character development in the way we conventionally perceive such things. There is absolutely no music, diagetic or non-diagetic. The action we are witness to happens in Iraq in 2006: we follow a band of American soldiers as they try to secure a section of a town. We know very little about these men – we don’t even hear their names. What we the audience watch over the ninety minutes of the film is a brutal depiction of what they go through in real time. It is visceral and gruelling: even watching is an act of endurance, the wounds these guys suffer and the pain they go through is is depicted so vividly.

But that is the intention. This isn’t supposed to be comfortable viewing, but leave us with the impression that war is truly hellish. I think it certainly succeeds in that. This is not conventional cinema but a filmic statement, in your face, uncomfortable and impossible to ignore. Yet as I rode the bus home last night, there was one nagging thought in the back of my mind: for all it’s upsetting depictions and brutally realistic portrayals of what this group of men went through; for all of it’s noble aspirations to cut through the usual gloss of action cinema, Warfare totally forgets that, at the end of the day, in Iraq in 2009, these men weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.