‘Warfare’ review: Alex Garland co-directs tense Iraq combat drama

Dirs: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland. US/UK. 2025. 95mins

This visceral, immersive real-time retelling of a 2006 Navy SEAL Iraq surveillance mission gone horribly wrong is as raw and direct as its title suggests. Co-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza — a former Navy SEAL turned Hollywood stuntman who was present during the events depicted — craft an unflinching, sharply authentic snapshot of combat that’s not about honour and glory, but desperation, fear and survival. It’s not for the faint-hearted either.

An unflinching, sharply authentic snapshot of combat 

Warfare comes a year after Garland’s topical Civil War grossed $127m worldwide to become A24’s second most successful release (after Everything, Everywhere All At Once) and is an exercise in pinpoint accuracy. Mendoza and Garland, who met while working on Civil War, have drawn their screenplay from Mendoza’s own memories and interviews with his fellow Navy SEALs. While it may not have the intriguing narrative hook of Civil War, the film’s stacked cast and good notices should result in solid returns when it opens in the US on April 11 (with IMAX screenings from April 9) and the UK a week later.

This is a raw, claustrophobic film that takes viewers into the middle of the action alongside the young American soldiers. Despite a brief opening sequence of the squad raucously enjoying Eric Prydz’s infamous ‘Call On Me’ music video, the film is almost entirely set in a nondescript home in Ramadi, central Iraq. (The building was, like the entire streetscape, painstakingly recreated at Bovingdon Airfield Studios, north of London.)

It’s here, after surprising and containing the home’s Iraqi residents, that officer in charge Erik (Will Poulter, part of a British-heavy cast) and a small group of fellow SEALs, including medic and sniper Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis), leading petty officer Sam (Joseph Quinn) and communications officer Ray (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), hunker down for a straightforward surveillance mission. And for a long while it is uneventful; the interminable watching and waiting another reality of war.

Even in these extended quiet moments, performances from the uniformly strong ensemble cast (which also includes Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini and Charles Melton) never let us forget where we are. Despite the banter, each man is aware and alert. The cast went through three weeks of SEALs training before filming, while living together as a group, resulting in easy interactions, confident weapons and equipment handling, and seamless rapid fire delivery of complex military lingo.

Just as we are being lulled into a false sense of security, Elliott spots men amassing in surrounding buildings and the public taking cover. When a grenade is thrown into the window, Elliott is hurt but he, like his comrades, follows protocol. Anxious but generally calm, the squad breaks down its equipment as they wait for a tank to evacuate Elliott. When they attempt to extricate him, however, an IUD is detonated, resulting in the death of two Iraqi scouts and injuries — rendered in stomach-churningly realistic prosthetics — to both Elliott and Sam. Surrounded, all the squad can do is attempt to keep the injured men stable and wait for back-up. “Look for the blood and the smoke,” Erik tells incoming officer Jake (Melton).

As the group hunkers down in the dark, away from the windows, oppressive framing from David J Thompson offers no respite from the ongoing horrors. Similarly, editing from Fin Oates favours long takes — up to 15 minutes in some cases — which never allow space to breathe. Brief cutaways to drone footage, which give an anonymous video-game look to events, intensify what’s happening on the ground. In the absence of music, sound design from Glenn Freemantle proves a bombastic exercise in hyper-realism that bombards the senses from all directions. 

Warfare certainly isn’t the first combat movie to take such an immersive approach to the subject, but what’s striking about this film is its overriding commitment to the truth as perceived by its real-life characters. An on-screen opening caption states that “this film uses only their memories”, and it plays entirely from that first-person point of view, reflecting the messy chaos of the day without dramatising or editorialising. Indeed, Mendoza and Garland are less interested in painting these men as patriotic heroes, than as a close-knit, vulnerable band of brothers determined not to let anyone die. This is not a portrait of the hard-set, grizzled, proud faces of combat, but of scared young men a long way from the safety of home.