Warfare (2025) review

Dir. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

Warfare was birthed by former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza and filmmaker Alex Garland whilst filming Garland’s previous feature, Civil War; on which, Mendoza served as “military supervisor.” In conjunction with his announcement that he’d be stepping away from directing, Garland was quick to give credit to Mendoza for Warfare, saying he was the support lifeline for Mendoza. Even without the first part of that announcement, that move makes a lot of sense when you see their collaborative feature.

Not to mention, anyone who has been around someone with military experience knows that often the best thing you can do in a setting where work must be done is get out of their way and follow their lead.

Warfare is a war film that trades Hollywood glitz, romance, and gratuitous subplots for authenticity, chaos, and a nightmare captured in harrowing real-time. It makes clear it refuses to relay your expectations of it by doubling-down on being inescapable and unblinking in its depiction of a small group of Navy SEALs on a surveillance mission in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. Via its opening titles, we’re told this is an account collected by the memories of those involved, including Mendoza. An epilogue shows the real-life men behind this operation, most of whom anonymous, coaching up the actors and walking them through the motions of how they remember the combat unfolding.

Warfare is stripped down to the point where it’s difficult even to parcel it into three acts. The story concerns a faction of SEALs tasked with raiding a family-occupied apartment in a Jihadist-controlled district and monitor activity from a market across the street. Translators (Nathan Altai and Donya Hussen) communicate with the families to keep them cooperative hostages while a sniper watches the activity occurring at a handful of nearby buildings. The first 30 minutes is largely surveillance, though you won’t find yourself bored. You’ll likely be contemplating how you’re going to get the knot out of your shoulders from your muscles tightening in suspense.

The American soldiers are both surrounded and outnumbered, and when the attack finally does come, it becomes all about getting a Bradley to medically evacuate the injured. In conventional war movies, the rescue would occur within a few scenes. Being that Mendoza and Garland commit to real-time, when aerial communication says that medical will arrive in 10 minutes, they mean just that. Soon, that timeframe becomes extended because the rescue op is delayed by firefights. Multiple soldiers are at risk of bleeding out. The Officer in Charge (Will Poulter) gets his “bell rung” by a claymore explosion and has difficultly focusing. Mendoza (D’Pharoah Woon-a-Tai) juggles tending to the wounded while communicating the orders issued by unseen voices. It’s pure, unadulterated chaos.

War movies are oft-famous for their scores. Warfare has none. Editor Fin Oates doesn’t impose his own stylistic flare onto the images nor their sequence. The casualties, for the most part, are unseen. Thousands of rounds of gunfire is exchanged in the direction of Jihadists, but we have no idea whether or not those bullets penetrate their intended targets.

The sparse aesthetics in turn allows for the sound editing to shine. One of my favorite effects in war films usually follows a massive explosion. The sound drops out, sometimes replaced by an incessant ring or a discordant tone, communicating the ensuing deafness of those in the vicinity. Sometimes there is no sound at all, just silence. This happens a couple times in Warfare, and it’s almost relieving given the picture’s sheer loudness. Everything from the gunfire to boots trudging feels thunderously loud. But those extended periods where sound is dropped instead gives way for images of soldiers’ screams of agony, or the disorienting dust that defines the aftermath of a major attack.

We don’t learn a whole lot about the characters in Warfare. Mendoza and Garland were rightfully confident in their approach of conveying the hell of war without dramatizing the lives of those involved. Don’t mistake the curious omission of character details for subpar performances. Woon-A-Tai is quietly engaging at the chief communicator of the group, especially when he works to apply tourniquets to the wounded and keep them stable. Will Poulter — fresh off strong work in Death of a Unicorn earlier this month — has this remarkable trait of feeling right at-home in any role in which he finds himself. He looks like an active duty SEAL, and plays one hell of a leader. Also excellent is Charles Melton, who first wowed me in Heart of Champions and was the emotional core of Netflix’s May December.

Some might wonder why I can excuse the lack of character development in Warfare when it was one of my chief complaints of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. The difference is Nolan’s film was geared towards spectacle, one that lost a lot of luster when it left theaters. When you remove the theatrical component from the film, which was underscored by 35mm prints, IMAX, and a wide variety of other film formats, Dunkirk played like various other war movies. Without the anchor of character development, it loses something integral to many of the great war films.

Warfare is all about authenticity. The spectacle therein is not rendered sexy and cinematic. Where spatial clarity is something many great war films harbor, the lack of it in Mendoza and Garland’s film loans itself to being authentic. The sparseness, from a lack of music and character development, allows your senses to cling to the suspense; more tangibly, it makes you focus on the collaborative work and banter of the SEALs. On top of being one of the most primal film experiences sure to find itself in a couple thousand theaters this year, it also might go down as one of the best horror films of 2025 too.

Starring: D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, Alex Brockdorff, Nathan Altai, and Donya Hussen. Directed by: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland.