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“’71” sets its thriller elements against the backdrop of The Troubles, the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict that also inspired films by  Jim Sheridan and Paul Greengrass . Director Yann Demange ’s feature film debut merges Greengrass’ kinetic camerawork with Sheridan’s character-driven drama; the result is a taut, suspenseful and involving feature that runs a tight 99 minutes. At its center is a very good performance by Jack O’Connell. Last seen in “ Starred Up ” and Angelina Jolie ’s “ Unbroken ,” O’Connell continues to bring equal measures of toughness and vulnerability to his characters. Despite his good looks, there’s an everyman’s quality to him, which he uses to full effect in “’71.”

O’Connell plays Gary Hook, a British soldier whose troop has been sent to Belfast to investigate an incident of violence. Prior to his deployment, we silently observe him interacting with his brother and his family. The silence provides an eerie calm before the storm; moments of serenity will be in short supply once Hook begins his mission. Once in Belfast, Hook and another soldier are separated from their retreating company during a chaotic riot. When the other soldier is brutally killed, Hook takes off for parts unknown to him. Pursued by angry Belfast denizens, Hook runs deeper and deeper into enemy territory.

As an action film, “’71” runs the risk of trivializing the horrific events of its setting. Screenwriter Gregory Burke avoids this by occasionally pausing the action to focus on the plight of characters on both sides of the conflict. As the lone man against many, Hook naturally draws our concern, but “’71” widens the net to show how deeply it ensnares friend and foe alike. The film spends as much time on Hook dodging danger as it does on people hatching plans to further agendas and manipulate alliances. There are British spies within Belfast who are loyal to that cause yet able to casually straddle the fence between the two factions. Both sides harbor folks who suddenly turn in traitorous or conspiratorial directions. Hook finds assistance and threat in unexpected places, and a constant stream of overwhelming cynicism flows just beneath the surface, waiting to be tapped whenever things seem too hopeful.

Besides Hook, several other characters emerge as the narrative progresses. Sean (Barry Keogan), one of the teenagers involved in the shooting of Hook’s partner, is shown returning home to a mother who is at first oblivious to his outside activities. Out to prove his manhood to his mates, Sean emerges as something of a tragic yet heroic figure in “’71,” avoiding the pitfalls of being demonized. His last scene with Hook has a stark, conflicted power that’s hard to shake; it goes from an unbearable scene of pleading on Hook’s part, to a cheap (though effective) audience-pleasing cliché, before climaxing in a shocking coda of unfairness.

Another character who leaves an impression is a young boy who brings Hook to one of the area’s safe havens for soldiers. He and Hook have a rapport meant to remind us of Hook’s relationship with his brother. Though the horrific outcome of this temporary respite is never in doubt, “’71” does not make these brief bonding scenes cutesy or overly sentimental. We’re always reminded of the layers of complexity involved in interacting with a wanted man. This is further highlighted in the scenes between the doctor who risks his own life to tend to Hook’s wounds, and the daughter who is unsure if her father should help.

Though it ably handles the dramatic scenes, “’71” is at its best when Hook is on the run. The riot sequence is excellent. Demange’s camerawork is urgent and chaotic, yet the audience is never lost while following the action. The ensuing foot chase is handled with dexterity and a sense of terror, culminating in the film’s best moment for Demange and O’Connell: Momentarily evading his pursuers, O’Connell curls up into a ball of exhaustion and fear. The camera remains fixed on him, and the soundtrack isolates the sound of his heavy breathing just before it breaks into the sobs of the terrified, inexperienced soldier baptized by fire in his first brush with death.

“’71” played in last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and received consideration at this year’s BAFTA awards. While it occasionally dips into formula, it is nevertheless a compelling, edge-of-your-seat thriller that weighs the innocence lost not only by its hero but by those who antagonize him.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Film credits.

'71 (2015)

Jack O'Connell as Gary

Paul Anderson as MRF NCO Lewis

Sean Harris as Captain Sandy Browning

Sam Reid as Lt. Armitage

Sam Hazeldine as C.O.

Charlie Murphy as Brigid

David Wilmot as Boyle

Killian Scott as Quinn

• Yann Demange
• Gregory Burke

Director of Photography

• Tat Radcliffe

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Review: In ‘ ’71,’ Young, Green and Behind Enemy Lines

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘’71’

Yann demange narrates a sequence from the film “‘71.”.

By Manohla Dargis

• Feb. 26, 2015

In “ ’71,” an excitingly jumpy, finely calibrated chase movie about a British soldier caught behind enemy lines, the director Yann Demange goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye. The soldier is played by Jack O’Connell, last seen being brutalized (in more ways than one) in “Unbroken,” the Angelina Jolie biopic about Louis Zamperini. That movie proved a bad fit for Mr. O’Connell, who never put down roots in the character, an Olympian turned World War II captive, because Ms. Jolie couldn’t or wouldn’t let him. By contrast, Mr. O’Connell runs away with “ ’71,” in which his character’s every emotional, psychological and physical hurdle makes for kinetic cinema.

I mean run literally. The movie is set against the sectarian violence in Belfast , Northern Ireland, in a year that opened with the tarring and feathering of several men by the Irish Republican Army. By February, a British soldier was dead as were a number of civilians, and several riots had convulsed Belfast. It’s against this backdrop that Mr. O’Connell’s character, Gary Hook, arrives with a regiment of similarly inexperienced soldiers. Smoke pours from burning cars, some strategically bookending streets like barricades. During the day, children play among scattered bricks that they sometimes hurl at the soldiers (when they’re not lobbing bags of feces instead). At night, the mazelike streets belong to the war and the running people, British and Irish, stoking the flames.

Movie Review: ‘’71’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “’71.”.

When you meet Gary, he’s a wide-eyed recruit on the receiving end of another man’s fists. He doesn’t talk much. The movie, written by the playwright Gregory Burke, favors narrative devices like foreshadowing and doubling over the usual blabbity blab, an approach that dovetails with Mr. Demange’s talent for elegantly deployed action. The blood that pours from Gary’s face bluntly sets the scene but also foreshadows the river of red to come. Similarly, the obstacle course that Gary and his fellow soldiers soon run, leaping and going belly down in the muck, forecasts the more punishing hurdles to come. Meanwhile, a short, elliptical sequence of Gary and his young brother, Darren (Harry Verity), adds some personal detail even as it presages the later appearance of a second boy.

That may sound too schematic, but Mr. Demange moves so effortlessly and rapidly from these introductory interludes that you may not notice all the parts shifting into gear. He knows when to linger in the moment, too, as when Gary watches Darren at a home for children, a place that, you intuit, the older brother knows inch by loveless inch.

You never learn why or how the brothers came to this sterile holding pen. As the story unfolds, though, you wonder if being parentless explains the seriousness of Gary’s gaze and his mournfulness. His immaturity and the military may explain his reserve, but it’s also a good guess that his survival instincts were honed in that home.

Those instincts kick in shortly after Gary and his regiment land in nationalist-controlled Belfast. There, on a broken-down street, they shakily stand at the ready while other British soldiers raid a building, noisily roughing up its inhabitants. As shouts ring out inside, locals begin gathering outside. Before long, the British soldiers are facing off with screaming civilians who soon engulf them. Mr. Demange inserts you right in the midst of this tumult, bringing you cheek to cheek with each side and using the trembling camerawork to create a visual instability that deepens the sense of escalating danger. Within a few minutes, one soldier is dead, his brains splattered across a wall, and Gary is on the run, his unit having inadvertently left him behind in the chaos.

Men and women have been sprinting across screens since Eadweard Muybridge turned his cameras on them in the late 19th century. The silent clowns ran as does Jason Bourne, and, at times, it seems as if the movies were made for ready, set, go, go, go: Buster Keaton bolting in “Seven Chances”; Cary Grant fleeing in “North by Northwest”; Franka Potente racing in “Run Lola Run.” Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with “ ’71,” but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy. One minute, Gary is ripping down an alley with the camera jostling after him, as if desperate to keep up; the next, he’s careering down a street, the camera now steadily gliding alongside him.

Much of the movie takes place in a single night, which certainly worked for James Joyce in “Ulysses.” Whether or not the filmmakers self-consciously borrowed from that book’s chapter set during one hallucinatory Dublin evening, Gary’s journey into this other night-town is similarly a voyage into the self. In between sprints — he’s soon fleeing a breakaway faction of the I.R.A., led by an eager killer, Quinn (Killian Scott) — he meets several souls who help him out, sometimes a bit too conveniently, including a father and daughter, Eamon (Richard Dormer) and Brigid (Charlie Murphy). What Gary doesn’t know is that the biggest threat may come in the form of an undercover British unit led by a twitchy captain, Browning (a ferocious Sean Harris). The enemy of Gary’s enemy is closing in.

“  ’ 71” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent and adult guardian). War violence.

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“’71” movie review

The early 1970s were bloody in Northern Ireland, with the Troubles building toward a fever pitch of bombings, riots and shootings that sent the death toll skyrocketing. It makes for an explosive backdrop in "  '71 ," director Yann Demange's gripping feature directorial debut about a British soldier who gets left behind by his unit in Belfast following a chaotic riot in 1971.

The plot sounds like the low-hanging fruit of action movies: A hero in peril needs to survive the night. But the complicated history elevates the story above pulp.

Up-and-coming actor Jack O'Connell (" Starred Up ," " Unbroken ") plays Gary Hook, who joined the army after growing up in an orphanage where his younger brother still lives. Shortly after Gary enlists, his unit is shipped to Belfast to subdue an increasingly dangerous situation. If the newbies in Gary's unit are ill-prepared, then their commander, the friendly if nervous Lt. Armitage (Sam Reid), is even more naive. He sends the men into the thick of things without riot gear, hoping a human touch and eye contact will be enough to quell the violence. It isn't.

The city looks apocalyptic with burned-out, still smoldering cars; small children hurling grotesque insults (and worse); and, at the sight of soldiers, people slamming metal trash can lids against the street, creating an unbearable din. What starts as a small crowd quickly swells into an irate horde.

During the first of many harrowing scenes, Gary gets separated from his unit and beaten by a mob. By the time he breaks free, his fellow soldiers have already rolled out, forcing him to scurry through the foreign streets, trying to evade armed nationalists out for British blood.

Unbeknownst to him, Gary’s survival depends not just on his own instincts, but on a complicated web of people, including two factions of the Irish Republican Army, British loyalists and undercover agents. To add to the confusion, each group is double-crossing another.

Meanwhile, Gary continues his odyssey and meets some charitable souls along the way. A young child (whose accent was indecipherable to these American ears) leads the soldier to what seems like safety, while a father and daughter risk their lives to help the young man.

The taut script was penned by Gregory Burke, who wrote the acclaimed play " Black Watch ," about Scottish soldiers in Iraq. The man knows how to build a story: Every early scene has a job that it performs well, to either deepen our understanding of the protagonist or foreshadow what's to come. When a commander pulls down a map of Belfast and tells soldiers that they need to steer clear of a public housing complex known as the Divis Flats, we know that information is going to come in handy later.

The filmmaking is equally efficient. After an explosion, the picture blurs and the only sound is a dull ringing. We feel like we’re there. But be warned: The fact that Demange aims for realism means the violence can be grisly.

“ ’71” succeeds as an action thriller, but with enough complexity to keep the brain engaged. The film is also a reminder of the byproducts of hatred. Seeing children who were taught from a young age to despise is both painful and powerful. The Troubles are over, which should give the viewer a tiny glimmer of hope. With all the difficult images in “ ’71,” though, neither Burke nor Demange seems particularly interested in optimism.

R.  At area theaters. Contains strong violence, disturbing images and language. 99 minutes.

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'71 Reviews

For a "war" movie, there's few gunshots, yet pure tension. '71 has its best moments when it knows its simple story give space to good moments of adrenaline and chaos. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 17, 2022

Violent British wartime thriller has strong language, peril.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2021

'71 immerses the viewer in a brutal world where just talking to the wrong person or being seen in the wrong place can get you killed, placing you in the heart of the action, and never pulls punches.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 6, 2020

Focusing on realism...[Yann] Demange, working with a script by Gregory Burke, goes for the gusto with a gut-wrenching action thriller/ character drama that speaks to the conscience.

Full Review | Dec 8, 2019

In '71, [Yann] DeMange creates a well-paced, gripping feature.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 20, 2019

You can keep your Liam Neeson action tripe and Jason Bourne-inspired shenanigans. We need more of the smart, savvy, sophisticated suspense that '71 has in spades.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 30, 2019

'71 shows true care and attention to its constructed world.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2019

There is a rich ethical murkiness that runs through this film on a near molecular level, and it strives to gets into the meat of what this kind of violent civil unrest and violence does to people.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2018

A tight script, great action, and well-paced suspense throughout.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 14, 2018

One of the sharpest British movies in some time.

Full Review | Aug 10, 2018

The film touches on the politics that inform the action but not enough to provide much context.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2018

This is one of the most extraordinary films I've seen this year, a knuckle-mashing, head-smashing, Tommy-bashing tour de force.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 19, 2018

The thick accents and murky lighting will be an impediment to some viewers, but the overall effect will get to you regardless.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2017

'71 takes an ethno-nationalist conflict rooted in hundreds of years of colonialist history and makes it beige, apolitical and gutless.

Full Review | Oct 2, 2017

Everyone knows war is hell, but not all directors know how to bring that concept to life.

Full Review | Aug 21, 2017

The film is certainly cynical about the inner-workings of the army.

Full Review | Aug 14, 2017

Demange crafts a tight, tense, white-knuckle night of the soul. He certainly proves he can stage a riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 25, 2016

An impressive debut feature buoyed by a captivating central turn.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2016

He's a passive hero, mostly getting buffeted along by events and people beyond his control. But '71 is no less of a deadly game of cat and mouse for that, focusing more on the other players in this very bad night.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2016

It's O'Connell's film and he's very fine indeed, even making you forgive the occasional (and expected) lapses into 'shaky cam'.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 1, 2016

'71 review: a visceral reminder of dark days

This visceral pursuit yarn makes northern ireland during the troubles look like a distant hostile planet.

Donald Clarke in conversation with Killian Scott, one of the stars of '71, the thriller by Yann Demange set in Belfast in 1971.

There exists a photograph of your reviewer – all purple flares and pudding-bowl hair – standing merrily beneath a huge wooden “71” positioned near the Botanic Gardens in south Belfast. For reasons that should be apparent, the optimistic Ulster 71 Expo, conceived to celebrate 50 years of the Northern Irish statelet, failed miserably to define the era.

There is certainly no mention of it in Yann Demange’s breakneck thriller set two miles west of the giant digits. This is a heightened version of the bloodied-parka Belfast we soaked up throughout decades of miserable news reports.

Film-makers have rarely dared to use the Troubles as a backdrop to any sort of mainstream entertainment. You cannot, after all, move through those waters without picking up inconvenient political residue in every exposed crevice. Demange's film engages with more than a few controversies. There are references to collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces. Elsewhere, we get an uncomfortable reminder of the Jean McConville murder. But, for the most part, '71 plays like a raw pursuit thriller. There's something of Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey or Mel Gibson's Apocalypto about it (even if comparisons between 1970s west Belfast and brutal tribal regions seem a little overstretched).

The movie could be set in a dozen warzones, but, having settled on Belfast, the film-makers revel in the artificial fibres, shaggy hair, and nicotine-yellow ceilings of a particular place at a particular time. The fact that '71 was shot largely in Yorkshire makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

The unstoppable Jack O'Connell – soon to appear in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken – stars as Gary, a soldier from Derbyshire dispatched to Belfast as the situation is slipping into near-anarchy. The commanding officer's opening briefing is among the film's weaker moments. Constructed for an international audience, Gregory Burke's script needed to explain the basic dynamics of the conflict, but the dialogue is patronisingly simplistic and the reference to the Protestant and Catholic "communities" feels a wee bit anachronistic. (That euphemistic sidestep did not become mandatory for another decade.)

At any rate, Gary and his comrades soon find themselves caught up in a chaotic street battle. He becomes separated from his squad and, as night falls, must face up to the challenge of making his way home through occupied territory. West Belfast being not quite so huge as the forests traversed in Apocalypto, Burke and Demange have to invent a few complications to impede his progress. He has a drink in a sinister loyalist pub. Compromised republicans seek his blood. Richard Dormer turns up as an ordinary man striving to do the decent thing.

Comparisons have been made with Carol Reed's Odd Man Out , but '71 has none of that film's sombre noir poetry. Shot in drab pea-soup green and endless cheap-leatherette brown, the film is suffocated by the tribal politics and zero-sum philosophies of those wretched times.

Yet '71 is never less than exhilarating. Demange, a Frenchman, who came to us through television, keeps his camera mobile without quite succumbing to the full, attention deficit restoring shuffle. O'Connell offers a perfect impersonation of a man who, though passing among working-class streets very like his own, feels himself stranded on a hostile planet.

It is, ultimately, reassuring to note that the worst years of the Northern Irish disturbances now seem sufficiently distant to allow their incorporation into a politically neutral entertainment. American cinema began treating the Vietnam conflict in this fashion within a few years of the fall of Saigon. We’ve got longer memories in this part of the world. Heck, just look at the first sentence of this review.

A visceral jolt to be savoured.

Donald Clarke

Donald Clarke, a contributor to The Irish Times, is Chief Film Correspondent and a regular columnist

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Seventh Row

A place to think deeply about movies

Alex Heeney / March 27, 2015

Review: In ’71 , a British soldier is lost in IRA territory

Yann Demange’s debut film, ’71, is a tense thriller set over the course of one fateful night for a British soldier lost in IRA territory at the height of The Troubles. It features a fantastic central performance from Jack O’Connell.

Read our interview with director Yann Demange here.

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Y ann Demange’s tense film, ’71 , is a thriller set almost entirely over the course of one fateful day in 1971 Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of The Troubles , is both a political and personal film. Told from the perspective of British soldier Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), a new recruit on the cusp of manhood, sent into battle before he’s even finished his training, ’71  looks at the clandestine machinations on both sides of the struggle — the IRA and the British Army and MRF who sometimes even collaborate and scheme together— but is completely devoid of the history behind the conflict: Gary is too young to understand the years of grief and oppression that caused the Troubles, so what he sees, and what we see, are the ways in which people get swept up in the battle, in the fight, without thinking.

When Gary’s unit is deployed in Belfast, and sent to assist the local police on a routine search of a local IRA home, a riot breaks out. In an attempt to recover a gun that gets stolen during the riot, Gary finds himself not only separated from his unit, but badly beaten, lost, and alone, deep in enemy territory. The rest of the film follows him as he struggles to survive the night, when telling the difference between friend and foe is no easy matter. His supposed enemies end up being the ones saving his life. And by the end of the night, almost everyone, including the MRF, wants him dead.

On their way to the household search near the beginning of the film, Gary’s unit rides through the streets of Belfast, finding wreckage at every corner: a vehicle on fire, smoke or rubble at every turn, and they’re even met with balloons full of urine and feces, thrown by local children. At the scene of the riot, it takes time for the momentum to build, but eventually everyone ends up caught up in it, unable to think, just viscerally engaging.

The women start by banging their trash can lids on the ground, making a ruckus. The soldiers line up across the street to form a barrier. As things escalate, Demange shoots with an increasingly shaky handheld camera, because in the thick of battle, you have no perspective, it’s all about survival. When Gary hears a man being beaten by the police behind him, he turns to look, but he doesn’t have time to let the shock or horror of what he’s witnessed register. He has a crowd to control. There’s no time to let his own personal politics or feelings enter into the battle. When Gary has to flee a throng of IRA men after his skin — they’ve shot one of his fellow soldiers who was also separated from the unit and now they’re after him — the camera movements get increasingly erratic and shaky. He can’t think. He just has to act.

Once he makes his escape, the film takes on a more measured pace. Now, Gary has to think and plan or he won’t survive the night. He finds an outhouse to hide out in and recover. This short scene may be some of O’Connell’s finest work. First, he’s out of breath, panicked, just trying to calm down. Next, he’s terrified, crying, fetal, angry, and totally broken. But he pulls himself together, he thinks things through. When he emerges, he’s discarded his uniform, and he’s picked up clothing from the clothesline in the backyard, ready to walk the streets to figure out his next move. The labyrinthine streets glimmer with golden light from the streetlights, as if from an impressionistic painting — like Pissarro’s nighttime Paris streetscapes — lending the scene a surrealistic quality: what danger lurks around the corner? It’s also gorgeous to look at.

Demange is a master at sustaining tension, without being afraid to pause for a breather now and then, to spend some time with the characters Gary encounters. As Demange told me in an interview, his goal was to avoid action fatigue: rather than speeding things up as we reach the climax, he counter-intuitively slows things down, as the stakes get higher. It actually serves to increase the intensity of the action without resorting to quick cuts and a shaky camera. Part of what makes the night so nerve-wracking for Gary is that there are these moment of calm, shot with Steadicam or on sticks, where people talk to him calmly. He never knows when his life is suddenly going to be in danger again. It makes every threat and every shot fired shocking.

Although O’Connell is in nearly every scene of the film, he rarely speaks. Yet this is an utterly compelling, thrilling, emotionally resonant and vulnerable performance. There’s not quite as much to work with as in Starred Up  — his character arc is a simple story of disillusionment — but the film is undeniable proof that O’Connell is a movie star. The world just hasn’t discovered him yet. Once Gary’s caught behind enemy lines, there’s a practical reason for his silence: his British accent would give him away before his boots do.

But there’s something bigger at work here, too, in Gary’s silence. This is a film about the class system. As someone with a working-class accent, at the bottom of the ranks in the army, Gary is silent partly because he doesn’t have the social right to be heard. The film has such a heightened awareness of the accents of each of its characters, and their relationship to class — from Gary’s senior commanding officer, Lt. Armitage (Sam Reid), with a posh Etonian accent, to the black corporal with a Jamaican accent (Babou Ceesay) — that the sounds of everyone’s voices, or the lack thereof, are themselves a statement. Gary doesn’t speak much, in part because Gary is a pawn, at the bottom of the social ladder, and at the bottom rung of the army’s ladder. When the army proudly declares that they protect their own, that courtesy does not, it turns out, extend to Gary.

The first time I watched ’71 , I was completely caught up in Gary’s struggle to escape the IRA on his trail, to survive. I was fascinated by his unlikely friends. First, there’s the foul-mouthed young Irish boy (Corey McKinley), who reminds him of his younger brother whom he visited at the beginning of the film, and who tries to brings him to safety. Then, there’s the Irishman and former Army medic, Eamon (Richard Dormer), and his daughter (Charlie Murphy), who mistake him for one of their own and give him shelter. Even those Gary encounters almost tangentially can be fascinating. There’s the IRA leader (David Wilmot) who is willing to set aside his political agenda, to spare a poor English boy’s life, but also sees it as an opportunity to get rid of a loose cannon in his army  (Killian Scott) by conspiring with the British MRF. And there’s the young IRA initiate (Barry Keoghan) who wants to be a gun runner, fighting for the cause, but isn’t quite ready to kill a man. He wants to belong but he doesn’t quite understand the weight of what that means.

But on second viewing, I had more time to think about the bigger picture. Who was responsible for putting Gary in this predicament? Why did Gary get separated from his unit in the first place? Shouldn’t he have been wearing riot gear for this assignment? Couldn’t the army have predicted that a riot was likely and have prepared the men accordingly? Would that have made a difference? He was dressed in riot gear when Armitage decided, at the last minute, that he wanted his men in berets, instead, to reassure the locals. Was this decision Armitage’s poor training and liberal conscious at work?

Was Gary’s nightmarish evening Armitage’s fault, even though, by the end, Armitage is the only one interested in saving Gary’s life? Or is it the army’s fault for putting Armitage, somebody Posh, in charge, even though he’s too ill-prepared and ill-informed about the realities of the situation to be making the decisions? Is the MRF wrong to want Gary dead by the end? Is this really  necessary for them to do their job? Is this hypocrisy at work or incompetence or both? There are no easy answers to these questions, and it’s to the film’s credit that it keeps the waters murky, even as it has you cheering for Gary. Can he even escape without being corrupted, too? The film is certainly cynical about the inner-workings of the army. Recalling his own days in the army, as he stitches Gary up, Eamon describes the organization as “Posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts.” By the end of the film, it’s hard to argue with his assessment, and it’s a chilling one.

’71  is now streaming on Hulu Plus and Kanopy in the US, SBS Movies in Australia, Prime Video and All4 in the UK/Ireland, and on VOD in Canada and elsewhere.

Read more: Director Yann Demange on the making of ’71 >>

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Alex is the Editor-in-Chief of The Seventh Row, based in San Francisco and from Toronto, Canada.

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