Warfare (2025): review

The war action film Warfare makes its intentions clear: it offers no grand account of heroism, no sentimental rhetoric and no conventional Hollywood war-film formula. Instead, it throws us into a Navy SEAL mission in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. The experience is so immediate and raw that we can briefly forget we are in a cinema rather than trapped in that cramped, dusty hell.

War at close quarters

Alex Garland directs with Ray Mendoza, a former SEAL drawing on his own experience. That perspective is palpable. The camera clings to the men, showing sweaty faces, narrow corridors and streets that are hard to make sense of. It presents war from inside the situation, in fragments, without conventional character arcs.

Sound rather than rhetoric

What grips me is the consistency of the approach. During the combat, there is no orchestral score telling us how to feel, no explanatory narration and no heroic montage. The situation feels loud, chaotic and disorienting. The point is not to retain an overview, but to become immersed in the confusion. It works. The sound design is brutally good: gunfire, screams and radio voices strike like a sledgehammer. This is raw tension rather than polished spectacle.

What the film leaves out

What makes Warfare different is what it leaves out. It avoids moral commentary and political judgement. Rather than explaining or justifying, it shows what war does to bodies and minds. That is uncomfortable. We sweat with the men because the situation becomes physically tangible. Such sober, direct filmmaking is rare.

Verdict

This will not suit everyone. Viewers seeking conventional storytelling or characters to identify with may struggle. Warfare is less a traditional drama than a state of emergency with a documentary feel. That is precisely its strength. It depends on experience rather than plot, and that experience burns itself into the memory: honest, intense and uncompromising. If you want a war film that says something by explaining almost nothing, this is it.