Warfare (2025) Review: You’ve Never Seen War Like This

Some war films offer a filter—a lens of heroism or national pride—through which we can process devastation with a comfortable sense of meaning or purpose. But Warfare, directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, makes a different choice. Focusing on a 2006 Navy SEAL mission in Ramadi, Iraq, it throws viewers directly into the center of violence and confusion. There is no comforting narrator, no big-picture context, and no grand speeches about duty or sacrifice—just the constant, churning presence of modern urban warfare. This approach makes the film challenging, unsettling, and, for those willing to endure its honest reckoning, extraordinarily powerful. Our review of Warfare (2025) examines how well it executes its vision for a realistic, unsettling war film.

Instead of the sweeping landscapes or choreographed heroics common to the genre, the film’s opening minutes are marked by an unnerving stillness. The camera lingers amid crumbling walls, anxious soldiers, and scribbled operational notes, offering an up-close look at the tension suffocating the team long before bullets fly. Garland and Mendoza seem determined to make viewers feel the exhaustion and frailty that defines so much of real warfare.

With each fleeting glance and shared silence, Warfare quietly builds a sense of pressure, making the world beyond the apartment where the SEALs wait feel as remote and dangerous as an uncharted ocean. The oppressive quiet soon gives way to unpredictable chaos, with violence exploding in abrupt, disorienting bursts that mirror the true unpredictability of combat. Here, survival is measured not in moments of control or triumph, but in frantic scrambles to stay alive as the situation unravels.

What makes this immersion so effective is not just the visual storytelling, but the meticulous use of sound. Rather than relying on conventional music to guide our emotions, the film constructs its world through a mosaic of ambient noises—distant detonations, the nervous clicking of gear, the rough breathing of men on the edge. This heightened realism connects us to trauma in a raw, almost physical way. Even moments that could have easily faded into the background—an extended, involuntary cry from a wounded SEAL, for example—are treated with the gravity of remembered nightmares. These sounds echo in the mind long after the violence ends, demonstrating that trauma is not simply witnessed, but absorbed and carried forward.

In its narrative, Warfare breaks further from tradition by avoiding elaborate personal histories or moments of individual valor. The film’s soldiers aren’t fleshed out with flashbacks or sentimental monologues; they are depicted, instead, as a tightly wound unit struggling to function within the fog of crisis. The actors, including Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Cosmo Jarvis, and Kit Connor, bring an understated discipline to their roles. Their performances are marked not by bravado, but by the visible strain of men who know their bodies and minds are nearing the breaking point.

At the group’s center, Charles Melton quietly commands attention. His portrayal of the team leader is defined by mounting pressure and the desperate attempts to hold everyone together as reality slips further out of reach. Ray Mendoza, whose real-life experiences helped inform the story, is depicted with subtlety and gravity by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.

The film doesn’t let anyone sink into a stereotype, either as unstoppable warrior or broken victim; instead, quick exchanges and fleeting smiles paint a picture of human connection hanging by a thread. Rather than showy set pieces or melodrama, the film relies on these understated variations—the awkward jokes, the tense pauses—to highlight just how fragile that thread can be.

The screenplay is built around memory’s failures—the gaps, silences, and flashbacks that ring hollow for those who lived through war. This focus on lived experience helps Warfare evoke a type of horror more lasting than physical wounds. Trauma, here, is not shown as a wound that eventually closes, but as something that lingers and shapes daily life, impossible to resolve by the time the credits roll. Silence is given as much weight as any firefight, cultivating an atmosphere of unease that seeps from the screen.

Still, in the midst of suffering, there are rare flickers of humor—awkward moments, brief laughter that breaks the tension, or a shared joke that reminds us the men remain human in spite of their ordeal. These moments never downplay the horror, nor do they offer easy relief, but they do ground the film in reality. They remind us that even in war’s worst moments, people search for meaning and connection, however temporary.

Within the broader landscape of war films, Warfare sets itself apart through its bold style and commitment to truth. Where movies like American Sniper or The Hurt Locker often use flashbacks and tidy story arcs to set their characters on a path toward redemption or closure, Warfare refuses to offer such comfort.

The story unfolds in real time, offering no preparation for sudden reversals or emotional lulls. The sheer claustrophobia of its setting echoes classics like Come and See and Restrepo, inviting us not just to observe, but to endure the confusion and fear along with the squad. The result is that viewers are left feeling less like spectators and more like reluctant participants, compelled to carry the weight of what they’ve seen even after the film ends.

This approach can be polarizing. For some, the relentless gloom and lack of resolution may feel overwhelming, or even alienating, especially in a genre where we have come to expect resolution, catharsis, or some measure of understanding. Nevertheless, the film’s stubborn refusal to sentimentalize its subject is its greatest strength. Like the best war narratives, it does not glorify or condemn; it simply asks us to listen and bear witness to pain—both its immediacy and its shadow.

The film’s final act, rather than culminating in victory, is marked by exhaustion and withdrawal. The SEALs’ hasty retreat leaves behind only ambiguity and destruction, punctuated by an image of an Iraqi woman standing amid ruins—silent, unblinking, a living remnant of all that is lost.

This moment lingers not as a tidy conclusion, but as a reminder that suffering and confusion persist long after battles fade from public memory. War, the film insists, is not an adventure or a cause; it is an event that breaks things—homes, bodies, minds—and resists neat explanation or closure.

Behind the camera, the partnership between Garland and Mendoza is crucial. Garland, known for his precise, often unsettling explorations of fear and moral ambiguity in films like Ex Machina and Annihilation, brings a cool, methodical touch to the proceedings. Mendoza, who lived through some of the events the film draws upon, shapes the psychological details and tactical veracity that lend the story its unique heaviness. Their collaboration is free from political commentary or heavy-handed symbolism, letting the moment speak for itself. At the same time, they manage to expand the film’s scope by letting the local horror of a single operation stand in for the countless, ongoing traumas of war worldwide.

If there’s a central message to Warfare, it is that trauma resists storytelling. The film’s fragmented, moment-by-moment approach is a visual articulation of that idea. Even with the greatest attention to detail and the best intentions, some wounds cannot be fully mapped or shared. Instead, we are left with glimpses—a shudder, a ragged breath, a haunted glance—that hint at histories too painful or complex to recount in full. The film’s commitment to this idea, paired with its careful balance of tension and brief, uncertain relief, is what gives it both emotional force and lasting relevance.

As modern war films evolve, Warfare points toward a new possibility for the genre: one that prioritizes lived experience, flawed memory, and painful honesty over grand vision or ideological closure. The filmmakers understand that war’s greatest damage is not always physical, but chronic—the psychic injuries that linger and echo, sometimes quietly and sometimes with a violence of their own. This is cinematic storytelling without filters or easy answers.

The film’s power lies not just in what it shows, but in what it refuses to show. By drawing its world narrowly—one building, one team, a handful of desperate hours—it strips away the comfortable distances moviegoers normally expect. Instead, we are pressed to admit our own discomfort, to recognize that some questions about violence, grief, and duty are simply unanswerable. Warfare is not about the origin or justification of conflict, but about what it feels like to be trapped in its relentless machinery.

Ultimately, Warfare isn’t for everyone. Its unwavering focus, bleak atmosphere, and absence of narrative closure may frustrate or even upset those looking for escapism or reassurance. But for viewers willing to face its uncompromising honesty, the rewards are profound. The film offers no catharsis, only endurance; no answers, only the challenge to listen, to remember, and, in some small way, to honor the complexities of human pain and perseverance.

A new direction for war cinema, Warfare exchanges patriotic spectacle for an intimate, detailed portrait of trauma and confusion. Its actors inhabit their roles not as archetypes but as human beings pushed to their limits; its story unfolds not as a campaign of good against evil, but as fragments of survival inside chaos.

Through its sound and silence, its tension and rare moments of shaky laughter, it reminds us that war is not a moment in history or a test of national valor—it is a storm that leaves scars on everyone it touches, and those scars rarely fade, no matter how the story is told.