‘Blitz’ is a blistering film which challenges any notion that 1940s war-torn London is something about which we should feel nostalgic. Racism, abuse and a lack of care from the authorities during the height of the German attack on the capital smartly interrogates and undercuts any notion that life was better in the days before a health service, a welfare system or more enlightened, and legally enforced, societal norms surrounding mixed race relationships and the exploitation of children.

Steve McQueen has done a magnificent job of reframing the wartime experience as told through the lens of a boy of mixed race parentage who finds not patriotic coming together among the different communities having to huddle together in bomb shelters and underground stations (heartbreakingly, we see individuals resorting to spending a night on the railway tracks for comfort), and where even the occasional kindly figure will happily exploit or demean a child for their own benefit, even when, in one scene, a kindly black woman’s offer of food to young George (Elliott Heffernan) is really all a ploy to recruit him in the world of looting and corpse-robbing, as ‘The Railway Children’ meets ‘Oliver Twist’.

This revisionist war drama is adept at showing how the white working class and black communities have to battle to survive in a world where Hitler’s Germany is not the only obstacle they have to face. We see them patronized and their safety and wellbeing disregarded, as with the railway station staff who were not prepared to open the local Stepney tube station to their own community. ‘The Railway Children’ comparison is a fair one, as here George and other London children are sent off into the countryside as evacuees, but George doesn’t reach his destination. He jumps off the train and undergoes an Odyssey on the streets of London as he tries to make it back to see his mother once again. There is a Children’s Film Foundation feel to this tale, but it is its clever blend of feminist solidarity in the factories and a deconstruction of colonial tropes that make this feel like it has something genuinely new to say.