‘The War Zone’: Tim Roth’s harrowing directorial debut
Depicting incest on screen is never going to be easy for the filmmakers and actors involved – or the audience watching. In 1999, actor Tim Roth decided to tackle the weighty topic in his directorial debut, The War Zone, inspired by his own history as a child sexual abuse survivor.
The actor, who rose to prominence in the gritty television drama Made in Britain, took a similarly social realist approach when making his first feature. Roth was no stranger to starring in movies that dealt with the darker and more troubling sides of life, from poverty in Meantime to incessant violence and crime in Reservoir Dogs. However, The War Zone ramps things up to the next level, refusing to hold back in depicting the harrowing events that might be occurring behind any of your neighbour’s doors that you’d be totally unaware of.
The movie stars Ray Winstone as Dad and Tilda Swinton as Mum, the parents of two teenagers, Freddie Cunliffe’s Tom and Lara Belmont’s Jessie. The family have recently moved from the city to the countryside, with Tom lamenting the loss of his old life. As he attempts to settle into the new house, becoming a big brother in the process (in a strange birth scene in which Swinton’s character delivers the baby within the rubble of a car crash), he soon discovers a horrific secret. Luckily for this family, there are no neighbours to witness the obscene nature of Dad’s twisted behaviour.
The War Zone explores the incestuous relationship that forms between Dad and 18-year-old Jessie, which we first catch a glimpse of when Tom sees them bathing together through the bathroom window. Roth’s film doesn’t intend to shock for the sake of it. Instead, he crafts a harrowing exploration into how something like incest – an incredibly taboo topic – can tear a family apart and leave victims with severe trauma.
The realism emulated by the film’s moody visual aesthetic and familiar set design – the house looks like your typical British countryside family home – makes the contents of the movie even more disturbing. The worst sequences to sit through are easily the sex scenes between Winstone and Belmont, in which the father forces his daughter into anal sex – with Tom watching from a hidden distance, unable to stomach what he is witnessing.
It could be easy for such a film to become gratuitous or exploitative, but Roth approaches the topics depicted with enough empathy that The War Zone somehow works, although it will make you feel incredibly unsettled. The film is not easy to watch, but Roth tells the kind of story that most people would rather not hear, forcing us to remove the wool from our eyes and face up to the fact that incestual abuse is very much real.
Talking to Hollywood, Roth revealed, “There’s only so many stories you can see in a lifetime. Why not do the one you would normally make maybe ten years down the line? Especially for me, if I’m going to find out if I can hack it as a director.”
Roth has never made another project as a director, but The War Zone showcases his real knack for filmmaking. Perhaps in the future, he will make another, although it is unlikely that he’ll be able to create a movie more harrowing than this.
