94 Minutes, Color, UK, 2002

Written By: Michael J Bassett

Directed By: Michael J Bassett

Dramatis Personae:

Jamie Bell is Charlie Shakespeare, raw young British army private with an intelligent, sensitive temperament to match his unlikely name.

Matthew Rhys is Doc Fairweather, Y Company’s overworked medic.

Hugh O’Connor is Bradford, Y Company’s disillusioned chaplain; like many Men of God in the First World War, he’s not finding his faith to be of much use or comfort.

Andy Serkis is Quinn, sadistic psychopathic member of Y Company, the only one who actually seems to be enjoying himself (hence, the psycho part).

Hugo Speer is Sergeant Tate, your standard-issue tough-as-nails professional soldier.

Laurence Fox is Captain Jennings, your standard-issue posh young officer in over his head.

Dean Lennox Kelly is McNess, motormouthed panicky Scottish soldier.

Kris Marshall is Starinski, malcontent with a taste for German pornography.

Hans Matheson is Hawkstone, earnest young Redshirt.

Rúaidhrí Conroy is Chevasse, wounded member of Y Company, spends the bulk of the movie dying.

Torben Liebrecht is Fredrich, captured German soldier, sole survivor of the last group of men who occupied the trench.

Commentary:

The early 2000s were a good time for British horror films. Between 2002 and 2005, some of the best examples of modern horror film came out – The Descent, Dog Soldiers, 28 Days Later – and they all came out of England. In a sense, they could ONLY have come out of England. Where horror directors on this side of the Pond were making these elaborate “torture porn” type movies, British directors took a different route. Dare I say it, a decidedly BRITISH route. Their movies were gory and disturbing, as horror films should be, but they also possessed a great sense of STYLE. British movies have always had a unique sense of style, but this is especially true of horror movies. It must be something in the blood of the British filmmaker to be able to create these images that are as striking to look at as they are horrible to contemplate; the legacy of Hammer lives on.

Deathwatch is a smaller movie than the other examples I mentioned, and didn’t have as much fanfare to its release, but it’s a still a solid example of this trend in film. It does have its shortcomings – though it’s certainly not too shabby as writer/director Michael J Bassett’s first film – but it’s effective enough: bloody and disturbing in very specific, understated ways, and highly evocative in atmosphere. In fact, Deathwatch owes most of its success to its setting more than any special effects.

That setting would be the Western Front, 1917. We are introduced to our main characters, the fresh-faced boys of Y Company, as they huddle in the trenches during a nighttime shelling, anxiously awaiting the order to go over the top (a notable exception to all the mortal dread is Quinn, who’s chomping at the bit to tear into the Germans, preferably with just his big-ass kukri knife; Quinn’s got…issues). When the order finally comes, young Charlie Shakespeare finds himself paralyzed with fear and will not move from the trench. He finally has to be threatened at gunpoint by a superior officer before he goes. Sure, you might be tempted to call Charlie a coward, but this IS the Great War we’re talking about here. Going over the top was basically suicide: charging into machine gun fire over uneven terrain littered with barbed wire, landmines, and debris, never knowing when an artillery shell was going to fall or mustard gas was going to be released. It is with this last that the British charge meets, and as the clouds of gas drift in, the soldiers are scattered in the chaos.

Sometime later, the remnants of Y Company manage to find each other. The gas attack has dissipated into a harmless fog, and dawn is breaking. Not sure where they’ve ended up, Captain Jennings orders some reconnaissance. As the advance scout, McNess is the first to stumble upon a grim and bizarre scene: a German trenchwork, full of mud-soaked bodies and manned by three lone frazzled German soldiers. McNess orders them to stand down and surrender, but unfortunately by now Quinn has caught up with him. Quinn kills two Germans outright and beats the third into unconsciousness before Sergeant Tate can stop him. Once things have calmed down, the British settle into the trenchwork and try to make sense of things. Jennings has determined that they have somehow gotten behind enemy lines. They have effectively captured a forward position from the enemy, and standard procedure dictates that they must now hold this position until they can make contact with their unit or until reinforcements find them. Jennings puts Tate in charge of sweeping the trenches, checking for any more survivors. Bradford and Fairweather take Chevasse, wounded in the spine and completely paralyzed, into the barracks. Fairweather has no delusions on Chevasse’s prognosis, so he does his best to keep him calm and comfortable.

While sweeping the area, the soldiers begin to notice some very strange things. The trenches form a huge complex of earthworks and shelters, built more like a maze than a fortification, and larger than would be practical for a simple forward position. All the dead they encounter are Germans, and they look to have killed each other. Hawkstone is ambushed by a German posing as a dead body, but he is rescued by Quinn (say what you will about the man, he’s good at killing Germans). Apart from him and the prisoner, there seem to be no survivors, but the trenches are so extensive and convoluted that it’s difficult to tell if anyone is hiding somewhere. Getting this report, Jennings decides that they should collapse some of the trenches with explosives. This will give the British a smaller area to worry about controlling, and it will reduce the places any potential assassins could hide.

When the soldiers set off the explosives, however, things start to get even weirder. A strange sound echoes through the trenches, almost like a creature howling in pain. A discharge like blood trickles out of the places where the explosives went off. Bradford finds an old radio, and he and Jennings try to raise the British command. When Jennings reports that this is Y Company, all they get is a garbled transmission saying that there are no survivors of Y Company. That night, things start to come to a head. Starinsky takes first watch, and while, ahem, appreciating some German artwork, he hears a noise. Following it, he makes a bizarre discovery: three dead bodies, wrapped in barbed wire and propped upright at the end of a trench. Understandably freaked out, he calls for the Sarge…but in so doing, he turns his back on the bodies, and does not see the barbed wire around them suddenly come alive and reach for him. By the time the rest of the men arrive, there are FOUR bodies at the end of that trench.

Now the Brits are pissed. They wake up their prisoner and demand answers (and by “demand,” I mean they basically let Quinn have a crack at him, then pull him off before he has too much fun). The German does not speak English, but he does speak French…and fortunately, so does Charlie Shakespeare, so they’re able to communicate. What he learns, however, doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t allay anyone’s worries. According to the German, this place is just EVIL. Something about this place drove the Germans crazy, and they turned on each other. The German warns the British that the same thing will happen to them if they don’t leave right now.

Tate and Jennings dismiss these warnings as an attempt to mess with their heads, and conclude that there just must be a German or two still out there somewhere. They decide to take more drastic action: the men gather as many bodies as they can find into the central location of the trench. Then they set more explosive charges, collapsing the trenchworks even further. This will either kill or cut off any remaining Germans hiding in the trenches, and will make the British position even better protected. This plan does not go well: as soon as they set it motion, the soldiers are assaulted by a deafening cacophony of sounds, a mix of artillery fire, airplane noises, and just plain aural weirdness that tosses them into panic and confusion. In the turmoil, Jennings accidentally kills Hawkstone, and McNess has a complete freakout.

Following this disaster, Jennings becomes unhinged and barricades himself in a tunnel. Tate, the closest thing to a voice of reason left, finds himself torn between following his commanding officer’s last orders to hold the position and listening to the desperate pleas of his men to just pack up and leave. And Bradford, still trying to desperately raise the army on the radio, starts to hear something else coming through his headphones.

It’s not difficult to make an effective horror movie set during wartime. There are already horrors aplenty to be found without resorting to the supernatural, and Deathwatch in no exception. The Western Front during the First World War was easily one of the worst places in human history to be, and by setting his horror movie then and there, half of Michael J Bassett’s work was already done. And done frighteningly well: the film is grim and nasty, and all-too REAL. There’s something very authentic about the stark Eastern European locations, as if the production crew didn’t need to do much to make it an authentic bombed-out wasteland. Everything is caked in mud, that horrendous wet, sticky, disease-infested mud we all read about in history class. Human bodies are barely recognizable beneath the mud, just left where they dropped to rot and mildew, and some have been there so long that they SQUISH when our heroes tread on them. Rats and beetles and other nasties roam free about the trenches, as they surely would have during the War. The place so authentically looks like Hell on Earth, that it’s almost unnecessary to have the Devil show up. Indeed, whatever malevolent force is at work in this trench, it works in very subtle ways, acting more as a catalyst than an adversary, setting events in motion that will turn the soldiers against one another. It’s both fitting and telling that when it does manifest itself, it does so through recognizably human instruments of war and terror. Barbed wire, trapping and tormenting its victims. Trenches and caverns that echo weird sounds and lead to nowhere but confusion. Distant voices over the wireless, carrying only despair.

Unfortunately, Deathwatch’s greatest strength is also its greatest flaw, and unfortunately a common flaw in atmospheric horror movies: the great atmosphere overwhelms other parts of the movie, notably the storyline. It’s never made clear just what the hell is going on in this trench. Just what the malevolent entity haunting them wants, or what it even IS. Is this just a haunted patch of ground? Is it a manifestation of the Earth’s anger at Mankind for causing so much death and destruction? Are the soldiers of Y Company actually DEAD, and this is some purgatory that they must endure? All are plausible explanations, and none are definitively put forth as the truth. The entity’s inconsistency doesn’t help matters much either: sometimes it’s content to simply harass the men with strange sights and sounds until they go mad, but other times, as with Starinsky, it takes the direct approach and does the killing itself. There seems to be no real rhyme or reason to it. We are forced to conclude that this is a symptom of a novice screenwriter: the monster acts how it must to drive the action where it needs to be.

Another unfortunate symptom of the novice screenwriter is the reliance on clichés, particularly in character development. All of these characters are well-written and well-acted, to be sure, but we’ve seen them all before. The naïve idealistic grunt. The inexperienced, regimented young officer. The panicky guy. The sadist. When things finally start happening in a major way, it’s all a little predictable. You know exactly who is going to do what; the only variable is when. When will McNess finally melt down and try to go AWOL? When will Tate and Jennings have it out over who has the best interests of the Company at heart? When will Quinn snap in a big way and have to be put down? When will Bradford start ranting crazed quasi-religious nonsense about what’s happening here? It’s done well, sure, but it’s been done before.

But this is, after all, Michael J Bassett’s first film, so I can forgive him for not making an absolutely perfect movie right out of the gate. In fact Deathwatch would be a respectable little horror film for even a veteran director. It’s small, but that’s why it works. It’s sparse and tight and evocative, like something David Twohy or George Romero might do at their best. The flaws could only be fixed by experience, and I hope Bassett gets more chances to perfect his craft. The British Horror Invasion may have run its course, but a good director will have plenty of opportunities ahead of him. I wish Bassett all the opportunity he can handle.

Things To Look For:

- It’s a weird thing to see Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis together in this movie, three years before starring together in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. You have to wonder if the two of them enjoyed working together here, so that one recommended the other for the later movie. It’s always striking to see a well-known actor in a pre-stardom role, and well, maybe Serkis and Bell aren’t superstars, but they’ve certainly got plenty more exposure since Deathwatch. It’s also a little bit disturbing to see how well Andy Serkis plays a psycho. Compared to Quinn, Gollum just had a few lovable quirks…

- Speaking of Quinn, I find myself wondering what he was supposed to be. I know that, back when Britain had an empire, they had soldiers from all over the world serving in their armed forces, and a lot of them had their own uniforms. Quinn wears some kind of fur vest over his regular uniform, and his weapons of choice don’t seem regular-issue (certainly not that kukri knife). Was he supposed to be some kind of Ghurka? Or were the knife and the vest just simply indicators of Quinn’s savagery? Whatever the reasoning, it works: it helps to set Quinn apart from the rest of the men of Y Company. He comes across as a sadistic thug who loves the war because now he’s being called a hero for killing people. Clothing him in animal skins and giving him a sharp object seems rather appropriate.

- I’ve seen enough horror movies to notice a pattern when it comes to religious characters, and Deathwatch, while adhering to that pattern with Bradford, does manage to do something slightly different with it. Somehow it always seems like the religious characters seem to be the most susceptible to influence from the evil force menacing them, and Bradford here is no exception. He almost becomes possessed by the evil entity, becoming its unwilling harbinger and articulator of its will (there’s a great but underdeveloped scene where we see Bradford listening intently to the radio and jotting down notes; we never see what he’s writing or hear who he’s talking to). This may be yet another point of divergence between American and British horror movies: in American movies, the religious character might ultimately be useless, but their rantings would help point our hero in the right direction. Here…well, there really ISN’T a right direction. And not really a hero, either.

- I do feel that I should say a few words about the fate of poor Chevasse. I don’t really think I’m giving anything away when I tell you he doesn’t make it. I mean, he’s been shot in the spine and he’s trapped in a muddy hole with a bunch of guys slowly losing their sanity. It’s a forgone conclusion. What is memorable, however, is the nature of his demise. It manages to be the most effective and disturbing death in the movie – one of the most effective and disturbing deaths I’ve ever seen on film, quite frankly – and what’s more, it has nothing to do with the supernatural horror surrounding him. Once again, I think it says a great deal about the authenticity of the World War One setting of Deathwatch, that the most memorable, skin-crawlingly nasty scene of horror is also the most AUTHENTIC. He didn’t die at the hands of the monster, nor at the hands of his comrades. Chevasse was a simple casualty of war, and somehow that managed to be even worse. I guess demons were kind of unnecessary for the soldiers fighting in the Great War; they were already living in Hell.

Written words (c) 2009-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: May 12^th, 2009

Complaints? Comments? Drop Me A Line!

Home Page

Archive Page