Pawns
2017 · 13m · UK
Directed by Tyrees A. Lamptey
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
In 1973, two aging men sit down to a game of chess and are pulled back to their fateful encounter as enemy soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, where bullets served as pawns and shared humanity was a fragile, dangerous thing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The bullet-as-pawn conceit wants badly to be subversive but lands in the territory of undergraduate symbolism—a gimmick that announces itself rather than earn its weight, and the film never quite escapes the gravity of its own metaphor to find anything stranger underneath.
Lamptey understands the grammar of war cinema and the formal discipline required to make a threshold moment—two timelines, a single game—speak across decades; the chess/trench parallel is earned through compositional rigor and a restraint that refuses sentimentality.
The decision to use actual bullets as game pieces, handled with tactile specificity rather than flourish, transforms a potentially overwrought premise into something physically grounded—you feel the weight of each move because the film treats the objects as objects first, symbol second.
Reviews
Each shot is beautifully framed, capturing the true horror of war; the script is bright and perceptive, avoiding undue sentiment but presenting an essential truth.