A melancholic boy faces the prospects of adapting to life in a craggy, rugged English countryside separated from the London he knows. We soon discover things are going to go from bad to worse. "The War Zone" is a special film about incest taken entirely from the perspective of the teenage son, Tom, and his sister, Jessie, giving it a quality of children versus their parents. Incest has been broached before in other films like "Celebration" and "The Sweet Hereafter" but never with such all encompassing realism as "The War Zone". You feel like a voyeur prying in other people's business. Director Tim Roth presents scene after scene of stark, uninviting, seashore landscapes as well as a mesmerizing movie score that vacillates between rushed crescendos and unnerving calm to give "The War Zone" a cold, somber tenseness. The acting is outstanding but Freddie Cunliffe as Tom and Lara Belmont as Jessie carry the film with their brave, demanding portrayals. Tom must weigh the secret he knows with preserving the stability of the home. He is so perplexed about normal love and the mere act of lust that when he comes upon attractive neighbor, Lucy and the set-up vixen, Carol, he becomes stupefied rather than attracted to them. Jessie must walk a fine line between the sex act she craves and her sense of right and wrong. Indeed, at one point, we sympathize with her less because she doesn't seem to mind her predicament. "The War Zone" ends in a way some will find unsatisfying but it is very consistent with the film's theme - lost children who will never find their way back.
