Deserters

The scouts

It's a competent WWI thriller with three guys in the woods, which is exactly the kind of tasteful prestige setup that makes me suspicious—though I'll admit the West Indies soldier angle at least refuses the default European narrative, so it's not *entirely* playing it safe.

Zanghi locates this film squarely in the lineage of intimate war cinema—the hideout as pressure chamber, moral ambiguity over heroics—and the restraint here is precisely calibrated: tension built through what isn't said, through the geometry of bodies in frame, and through the editing's refusal to sensationalize the encounter with the German soldier.

The decision to shoot almost entirely in near-darkness, letting the audience piece together space and threat from fragments of light and sound design, transforms what could be a conventional desertion narrative into something tactile and disorienting—it's an economical choice that makes the entire film feel like it's happening in real time.