‘War Zone’ Ventures Into Scarred Emotional Terrain

The jagged and starkly beautiful coastline of North Devon provides an evocative setting for “The War Zone,” British actor Tim Roth’s small-scale directing debut. The film is as severe and compelling--and, yes, in its harrowing way, as beautiful--as anything Roth trained his gaze upon in that rocky landscape.

The “war” to which the title alludes is waged, for the most part, internally, on bleak and emotionally craggy terrain. This makes it no less hellish or deadly, particularly when the conflict spills out into the larger arena of a seemingly contented middle-class home.

The film deals with incest. If the subject seems better suited to television, it’s because that medium has staked an unwarranted claim on intimate stories. But television tepefies such material in the process of turning it into melodrama. “The War Zone” is decidedly unmelodramatic. Much of its strength resides in the way it eschews narrative contrivance. The movie observes behavior without explaining or judging it.

The family at the heart of this impressively acted drama has moved from London to Devon, where the father (Ray Winstone, best known here for “Nil by Mouth”) struggles to reestablish a business. A sexually active 18-year-old daughter (Lara Belmont, in her first acting role) is looking forward to moving back to London to attend college. Her watchful younger brother (Freddie Cunliffe, also in his first role) wrestles with loneliness, his emerging sexuality and a troubling family secret. The mother (Tilda Swinton) gives birth to a third child early in the film. No more than this should be said about the plot.

Roth (a fine actor who has appeared in two Quentin Tarantino films and other movies, including “Rob Roy”) and his cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, and production designer, Michael Carlin, have done superlative work here. Not one shot escaped the filmmakers’ exacting attention to detail. The chilly blue- and green-tinged hues; the drab, cramped interiors; the empty outdoor spaces; the bare, grasping branches on gnarled and lonely trees--the images all conspire to tell us, even without words, that we’ve passed into a wintry wasteland of the soul.

The story is told largely through such painterly images and through behavior photographed in lingering shots. Like in real life, the reasons behind the characters’ actions are not always immediately apparent. The effect is of watching lives unspool before an unobtrusive camera, the way truth may be revealed before the documentarian’s gaze.

Alexander Stuart wrote the screenplay from his own novel, which was published in 1989 to immediate controversy and acclaim. Selected to receive the Whitbread Prize, the judges reportedly had the award withdrawn because of the subject matter. Perhaps to counter expected controversy over the movie, Roth talks in the film’s production notes about its social significance, but such talk inevitably is reductive. The movie stands on its own.

The family is the story’s obsessive focus, and because of this, characters on the periphery tend to blur. The script’s reticence may be faulted for causing more confusion than is necessary about how one or two characters are related to the others. This is a minor quibble. Somewhat more serious is the way, when one looks back on the film, one bloody and shocking scene near the beginning juts out. In another type of movie, the scene’s power might serve as its own justification. But in this film, which makes so few marketplace concessions, one struggles to find a valid reason for violating the movie’s general atmosphere of restraint.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: The film is emotionally brutal, with nudity, some violence, one extended scene of father-daughter incest and a bloody birthing scene that takes place in an overturned car.

‘The War Zone’

Ray Winstone: Dad

Tilda Swinton: Mum

Lara Belmont: Jessie

Freddie Cunliffe: Tom

Aisling O’Sullivan: Carol

A FilmFour presentation of a Sarah Radclyffe Productions and Portobello Pictures production. Director Tim Roth. Producers Sarah Radclyffe and Dixie Linder. Executive Producer Eric Abraham. Screenplay Alexander Stuart. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey. Production designer Michael Carlin. Editor Trevor White. Composer Simon Boswell. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

In limited release.