Contact was certainly a visceral experience for my first Alan Clarke film, a powerful and yet unsensational starkly stripped-back war movie about British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. Clarke's use of minimal dialogue and fluid handheld camerawork lend the film an excellent sense of tension where it manages to create fear, confusion and bravery of uniformed soldiers fighting against an unseen enemy. Granted this means that the film ends up being an almost sparse, documentary-like experience but one that lends itself to the finely-judged performances of its cast, Sean Chapman especially. With its use of the endless and eerily beautiful Irish landscape, Contact manages to maintain its unending sense of dread through the eyes of the characterless soldier managing to convey all their experiences in a swift 66 minutes, from the boredom to the oddities and, most grippingly of all, the terror.
Review of Contact
