Through Smoke and Silence: Enduring Warfare (2025)

War never arrives clean. It drags with it dust, confusion, and the sour taste of fear that never really leaves your mouth. Sitting at home yesterday, I found myself watching Warfare, a film that insists on reliving a single night in Iraq, November 19, 2006, as if the past were a wound that won’t close. It isn’t nostalgia. It isn’t a spectacle. It’s an invitation into claustrophobia, into a house in Ramadi where every corner hides a threat and every breath feels borrowed.

The work itself is blunt in premise: Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL who lived through the experience, teams with Alex Garland to bring it to the screen. Shot in real time, it follows Alpha One, a platoon holed up in a two-story house after the Battle of Ramadi. We meet Ray, the communicator, and Elliott Miller, a sniper and medic whose own body will become the narrative’s breaking point. The ensemble cast, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, and Charles Melton, plays with urgency rather than celebrity. This is not a star vehicle but a collective descent.

Why it matters is less obvious. We live in an era where war films often fall into two traps: either hollow reverence for military machinery, or cynical detachment masquerading as critique. Warfare tries something different. It narrows its scope to the unbearable minutes of indecision, the fog of concussions, the moral calculus of saving the wounded when every exit may be mined. It asks us to sit with a mission that will never be in the history books, but that reshaped the lives of a dozen men forever. It also arrives at a moment when the Iraq War, often buried under new cycles of conflict, resurfaces in memory as something still unresolved. Watching it, I felt that echo of unfinished business: a war fought, forgotten, and now re-voiced.

Artistically, the film borrows Garland’s precision and Mendoza’s lived knowledge. The camera refuses wide vistas. Instead, it forces us into cramped rooms, blinds us with smoke, and leaves us half-deaf from explosions. Time stretches; one hour in the film feels like ten years. The acting is stripped of glamour; Cosmo Jarvis as Elliott Miller brings such raw physical collapse that it feels invasive to watch. Sound design is a character itself: the dull thud of an IED, the hiss of a radio transmission, the shrill, unending cries of a man in agony. And somewhere between the silence and the chaos, the film dares to portray soldiers as disoriented, disassociated, and unable to trust their own senses. It’s not just combat; it’s trauma unfolding in real time.

That trauma is precisely why this film can be triggering for some. The unflinching depiction of battlefield injury, the constant fear of ambush, the sight of a man losing both speech and mobility, these are not cinematic ornaments. They are realities relived. For veterans, survivors, or even civilians carrying their own scars, Warfare may feel less like a story and more like a mirror. That is both its strength and its danger.

The reception has been divided but passionate. Critics from the BBC and The Guardian hailed it as masterful, drawing comparisons to Saving Private Ryan and Come and See, two films that never let audiences look away. Others, like Deadline, saw propaganda where others saw testimony. But even that criticism reveals the tension inherent in the project: how do you convey the truth of an American war without slipping into the myth of it? How do you honor the wounded without excusing the war that wounded them?

For me, the film’s legacy may rest less in its politics than in its insistence on endurance. It’s not a film about winning. It’s about surviving long enough for help to arrive, and about what happens when help doesn’t. The montage of real SEAL Team 5 members at the end refuses distance; it reminds us these were not invented men. And the dedication “For Elliott” lingers, heavier than any medal.

In the end, I don’t think Warfare is asking to be liked. It’s asking to be endured, questioned, even rejected. It tells us that war is not just fought in deserts or streets, but in the minds of those who come home, fractured and incomplete. The families in the house survive. The insurgents regroup. The soldiers evacuate. But the story doesn’t end there. It follows everyone out of that neighborhood, into their futures, into ours.

And maybe that is where the film leaves its deepest mark: in reminding us that wars end on paper long before they end in the body. Watching Warfare feels like reopening a scar, not to wallow in pain, but to remember that it happened, and that some wounds never really close.

Warfare (2025). Still image featuring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, and Joseph Quinn. Image 23 of 121. © A24.

Warfare (2025). Promotional poster featuring Cosmo Jarvis. © A24.

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