The highest praise I can offer “Warfare,” a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning. That’s to the point of this factually informed fiction, which tracks a platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs during a calamitous mission in Iraq. There, under cover of an otherwise still night, the troops take over a seemingly ordinary home, place the inhabitants under guard and stake out the area. Then the men watch and wait while sitting, standing and sometimes agitatedly peering out windows in the name of a cause that no one ever explains outright.
Among those not explaining any of this — the mission, its averred rationale and its carnage — are the writers-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. Garland’s last movie was “Civil War” (2024), an eerie, uncomfortably realistic slice of speculative fiction set in a war-torn United States that Mendoza, a former member of the SEALs, worked on as the military adviser. That experience led to a friendship and now to “Warfare,” which is based on a real operation in 2006 that Mendoza took part in; at the time, the Americans were attempting to take control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The war was three years old by then, an estimated 600,000 Iraqis were dead and American fatalities would soon reach 3,000.
Much of “Warfare” takes place in real time inside a blocky, two-story building where the inhabitants, including several children, are sleeping when the Americans enter. Crowded into a bedroom where they’re watched over by a rotation of guards, the Iraqis aren’t named (not that I remember, at least) and are scarcely individualized. The military men are more distinct, largely because they’re either played by somewhat familiar faces — including Will Poulter, as Captain Erik, the head of the initial operation — or have distinguishing features, like the mustache on Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis), the head sniper. (The movie is dedicated to the real Elliott Miller, who somehow survived the operation.)
Garland is very good at building suspense, and he’s especially adept at turning quiet spaces into unrelenting zones of dread. “Warfare” opens with a burst of raucous silliness as uniformed men crowded around a monitor in a small room watch a risibly tacky music video for the dance tune “Call on Me.” Set in what’s meant to be an aerobics studio circa the 1980s, the video features a throng of big-haired, tight-thighed hotties (and one pitiful dude), stretching and pumping as if warming up for an orgiastic marathon. It’s a spectacle that the guys watch with collective pleasure and much whooping, and which underscores that you’ve entered a specific world of men that, minutes later, goes spookily quiet in an unnamed town.
