All Quiet (Because They’re Dead) On the Western Front

(And no, that’s not one of those Sixth Sense-like spoilers I tossed in for a headline. There are soldiers in this movie and lots of them die. Settle down.)

It’s an odd thing to say, but there truly aren’t enough war-set horror films. You would think that the very nature of mankind’s most powerful, negative, and scarily constant action would breed a richer subgenre than torture porn or giant creature portmanteaus, yet the output is surprisingly small. I imagine there are a lot of buried treasures of war hidden under mobs of slashers and zombie overpopulation, but considering the ripe themes and simple terror of battle, there just simply should be more.

Thusly do we have Deathwatch, a 2002 British ghost story of sorts set in the trenches of World War I. Is there a scarier place to set your film?

Quick Plot: It’s a rough day at the Western Front as a troop of English soldiers chaotically flee their trench in a shrapnel storm. Without them knowing when night turned to day, the group finds themselves in eerily abandoned territory, eventually discovering a German trench filled with three soldiers. The men shoot two and imprison the third as each Brit develops his own slow descent into cabin fever.

The soldiers are a mixed bag, ranging from the innocent and bright eyed 16 year old Charlie ‘Shakespeare’ (Jamie Bell) to the grizzled, one-step-away-from-going-Gollum sadist Quinn (Gollum himself, Andy Serkis) who may find world war the best excuse to blow off steam since the invention of the stress ball. In the middle are an edgy chaplain, sympathetic doctor, dying (and oft forgotten) private, stuffy and bureaucratic captain, and token horndog played by the token horndog in Love Actually.

Some people get typecast in any genre.

Deathwatch is essentially a haunted house film...just a haunted house film placed in a rat-infested, mud-covered trench that’s already overflowing with corpses of war. It’s a brilliant and all-too perfect premise for a horror film, one that writer/director Michael J. Bassett doesn’t waste. Opening in the middle of gunfire is hugely effective as we instantly feel the horrors these men are living every day. The transition to the foggy, ghost-like world set in the trench is creepy without being overly obvious, slowly revealing some mini-nightmares waiting to wake up. Though some of the CGI effects stand out in a bad way, Bassett makes excellent use of much of his imagery. A camouflaged soldier in mud, the barbed wire-imprisoned dead, and the no holds barred approach to showing the human body as it deteriorates from battle go far in making Deathwatch something that horrifies from several angles.

Performances help immensely, with each British thespian doing a solid job. The film doesn’t quite have the same male fraternity as, say, Dog Soldiers, but that’s more because the nature of the horror here is more divisive than uniting. A few go a little mad,  but in different ways and for different reasons, making their descents interesting in their own ways. Others find their haunting from more physical--and blatantly evil--manners, including one truly nasty rat-inspired death that will probably make even a cousin of Splinter squirm.

High Points

Somewhere in the third act, as the action was exploding in every which way, I found myself a tad frustrated, wondering if there’d be any explanation other than the tried and true ‘war is hell.’ Without spoiling anything, I can assure you that the final beat of the film won me over by putting the whole story in a specific moral context that felt earned and effective.

Low Points

It’s natural for a film that primarily takes place at night to be quite, you know, dark, but sometimes the whole ‘I can’t really see anything’ness can be irksome

Lessons Learned

All it really takes is a single cloth mask to protect oneself from poisonous gas

Always be kind to bilingual German soldiers

Chekhov’s Law: If a homemade mace is introduced in the first reel, you best use that homemade mace by the fifth

Rent/Bury/Buy

Deathwatch is a refreshingly solid horror film that isn’t really perfect, but sure makes the most out of its vast potential. Currently streaming on Netflix Instant, it’s a great turn-the-lights-off kind of evening for a different and occasionally rather frightening time. I’d make some kind of cute military call to watch it here, but I feel like such a pun would warrant my face to be wrapped in barbed wire or for Gollum to wave a mace at my head, so just go watch it and save me the trouble.