Only relatively recently has child abuse changed from an act that is unthinkable to one that we know – at its worst – is carefully planned and highly organised, involving hundreds of children and perpetrators. These days, newspaper headlines scream warnings about the dangers posed by the release of abusers; inside stories feature reports of enquiries into the sexual abuse of children by teachers and social workers – the very people into whose care they have been entrusted. Recently, angry public response over the release from prison of convicted paedophiles (and the subsequent decision to accommodate them within the grounds of a prison) has spilled over into vigilante action.
This level of response may indicate our need to label one group of people ‘victims’ and the other ‘perpetrators’. Perhaps, too, it indicates a desire not only to protect our own families and children but to perceive all dark, violent and perverse impulses as being outside us and within people whom we label evil. Yet, a 1993 study of the case files of 459 offenders in Scotland (Dobash et al.) found that most perpetrators of child sexual abuse lived in the same house as their victims and that just under 50 per cent were biologically related. Why is it then that incest rarely makes front-page news? Is it our reluctance to acknowledge that family members pose a greater risk to our children than predatory strangers?
In his directorial debut, Tim Roth tackles the subject of incest head-on. Adapted by Alexander Stuart from his 1989 novel of the same name, The War Zone is a bleak, unsettling film about a family which has moved from London to a grey, wintry Devon. The father (Ray Winstone) deals in architectural salvage; the mother (Tilda Swinton) is heavily pregnant. Jess (Lara Belmont) is about to return to London to start college, while her younger brother, Tom (Freddie Cunliffe) resents the move to Devon.
Within minutes of the start of the film, mother’s waters break and father drives the family at top speed through the dark, Devon countryside to the hospital. The car crashes. Slowly, one by one, the members of the family emerge, cut and bleeding, from the wreckage, the mother carefully clutching her newborn baby. This shocking scene is the first of several in The War Zone.
The film is seen largely through the eyes of Tom, a taciturn teenager who is protective of his mother and dependent on his sister. He glimpses something through the bathroom window which leads him to believe that his father and Jess are having a sexual relationship. His sister’s denials and the insubstantial evidence leave the audience unclear whether there is an incestuous relationship between father and daughter or whether this is the fantasy of a boy who is sexually attracted to his sister.
Eventually, Tom follows his father and Jess to a deserted clifftop shelter and watches as his sister is brutally sodomised. Despite the violence of this scene, Tom finds it difficult to absolve his sister of blame. Later, at home, he challenges her again. Her response is to hold a flame against her naked breast and then invite him to do the same – which he does.
We discover little about the family, its history and its relationships; the film is set very much in the here and now, which is both its strength and its weakness. This creates an intensity and unpredictability which heighten the disturbing nature of the events depicted – and, of course, our own discomfort. However, without any knowledge of the characters’ history and background, the father’s violent anal rape of his daughter is an inexplicable and somewhat dislocated act.
That said, there is a sense of authenticity in both Tom’s and Jess’s behaviour and responses both in terms of adolescence and the family dynamics created by an incestuous relationship. Unwilling to see his father wholly as perpetrator, Tom blames his sister for the seduction, for betraying her own mother and – perhaps – for having sex with someone other than the brother who is himself fascinated by her adolescent sexuality. Similarly, when Jess burns her own breast, we are reminded of the victims of incest and other sexual abuse who use self-harm to communicate their disgust with their own bodies and what has been done to them.
In Nil by Mouth, Ray Winstone achieved the seemingly unachievable by portraying an extremely violent husband as worthy of our compassion as of our condemnation. In The War Zone, however, the fact that we learn so little about the characters and their background means that Winstone’s character (and that of Tilda Swinton, his screen wife) remains undefined and fails to take advantage of the emotional truth which this uncompromising actor is able to portray. Paradoxically, this lack of complexity elicits stunning performances both from Lara Belmont and Freddie Cunliffe.
Ultimately, The War Zone is not a great film. However, it is a disturbing portrait of a family fragmented by incest.