Plot
In London during the Second World War, nine-year-old George is the mixed-race son of a white woman, Rita, and Marcus, a Black man who was deported to Grenada. George remains in London after the Nazi bombing has begun, living in Stepney with his mother, the family cat Olly, and Rita's father Gerald, a pianist. Gerald encourages Rita to evacuate George to the country for his safety. Before he leaves, George's grandfather gives him some pocket money, and his mother gives him a Saint Christopher medallion that had belonged to his father.
George is evacuated from the city amidst the Blitz, and though he is initially upset with his mother for sending him away and refuses to say goodbye to her, leaving her distraught at the station. Aboard the train, several boys taunt him for the texture of his hair, likening it to a dog. Using a line he learned from his grandfather, George stands up to the bullies, which impresses the girl opposite him, who has come to his defence.
Ultimately, after some time aboard the train, he decides to escape. George defiantly jumps off the train to return to his mother in London. He stows away on an eastbound goods train and meets three brothers. He befriends them and shares with them the only food he has packed in his suitcase, a sandwich with strawberry jam. The next morning, George and the brothers escape from the train, although one of them is killed by an oncoming train. Using the coins given to him by his grandfather, George manages to catch a bus to London.
In one flashback, George is called a "Black bastard" by a neighbourhood boy after a street cricket match. In a separate flashback, George's parents dance at a swing club, and Marcus gives Rita the Saint Christopher medallion, revealing it was his own mother's; as the pair leave the club, Marcus is attacked by some racist ruffians intentionally antagonising the two, and as he defends himself, he is ultimately dragged off by police who do not believe he is the victim.
Rita sings a song on a BBC radio broadcast from the factory where she works. Afterwards, her colleagues come on stage before the broadcast has finished in order to protest and demand on air for the tube stations to be opened as shelters. Rita is criticised because of her mixed-race son, whilst spending time with work colleagues in a local pub. Jack, Rita's friend, argues with a man who was rude to Rita.
George arrives in London but cannot find his home in Stepney. While looking into the display windows of a presentation on colonial sugar production, including depictions of Caribbean sugar plantations and grotesque caricature statues of Black men, George is found by Ife, an ARP warden originally from Nigeria. Ife cares for him and brings him to a shelter whose population represent the multiethnic nature of the East End. In the shelter, one family has put up a sheet to separate them from their South Asian Sikh neighbour, who is indignant. A Jewish man attempts to come to the Sikh's aid and decry the racist act, and when the situation escalates, Ife intervenes and delivers a speech reminding all of the citizens in the shelter to remain united. Ife puts George to bed and tells him he will help him find his way home in the morning after his shift. George wakes up the next morning and learns by way of another ARP warden that Ife was killed trying to help a woman evacuate her house during the bombing.
At work, Rita is summoned to her manager's office, and told by members of the Board of Education that her son did not reach his final destination, and in fact jumped from the train. She is furious, and runs out of the factory determined to find him, even if it means forfeiting her job.
Hungry, George is wandering the streets when Jess, a member of a gang of thieves, offers him food and pretends to help him. Instead, George is threatened to help the thieves steal from a damaged jewellery store and a bombed out club. The thieves mistreat and threaten him, even taunting him with the severed limbs of the corpses of killed club patrons. He escapes from the gang and ends up seeking shelter overnight on the tracks in an overcrowded underground station.
As the morning nears, the Tube station suddenly begins to flood. No one can escape because the gates were locked to prevent further overcrowding the night before. George is able to escape with the help of others. George gets help and the gates are opened allowing people to escape.
George wakes up in a strange bed. A woman called Ruby is seemingly helpful, but has called the police because there is a missing child notice posted for George. George escapes from the house through the window. He makes his way through Stepney and reaches his block on Clifford Lane. Upon arriving at his house, George sees that his building has been bombed the night before. As workers extract and rescue the family cat Olly from the destroyed home, George peers inside and sees that his grandfather Gerald has been killed in the bombing. As he weeps, his mother, Rita, comes up behind them, and the two are reunited in a bittersweet reunion among the piles of rubble.
Production
Casting
In September 2022, it was announced that Saoirse Ronan would be heading the cast and Adam Stockhausen leading the production design. [5] In December 2022, Harris Dickinson, Erin Kellyman, Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke were added to the cast, along with singer-songwriter Paul Weller in his feature film acting debut. [6] Later that month, Benjamin Clementine, Leigh Gill, Mica Ricketts, CJ Beckford, Hayley Squires and Sally Messham were announced as joining the cast. [7]
Music
The idea behind the whole thing is the story of a child who is trying to get through war-torn London, which has been bombed all the time, and trying to find his mother again. What I wanted to do is, I wanted the grownups – you, me, the grownups – to feel the same sort of disassociation, being completely lost in the world, being illogical, not knowing how to get there, not knowing how to get home, not knowing how to find home, and having that horror, that fear that you’ll never find it again; the horror of these massive bombs coming down. So the only way I could think of doing it was to write music which was so brutal and so absolutely violent.
While Hans Zimmer has previously ventured musically into World War II with films like Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor , working on Blitz allowed him to look at the era, and a facet of his own family history, in a new way. Zimmer revealed that his mother had been "a refugee in England during the Second World War, and Steve McQueen gave me one direction. He said 'After you watch this film, you will understand your mother better'", during a Deadline Sound & Screen event. The story moved Zimmer to create a score to reflect the unrelenting chaos and brutality of the Blitz: "This score is unmitigatedly horrendous", he said. "It is an absolute horrible score, it's so dissonant, it's so committed to this atonality." [13]
