Drama about a platoon of British paratroopers on patrol in Northern Ireland.Drama about a platoon of British paratroopers on patrol in Northern Ireland.Drama about a platoon of British paratroopers on patrol in Northern Ireland.
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe original script by A.F.N. Clarke was a faithful adaptation of his book of the same name which was a memoir about his two tours of duty in Northern Ireland in 1973 and 1976. Director Alan Clarke was not happy with the script, feeling it would not be possible to make with the limited budget and shooting time he had. So A.F.N. Clarke had to scale everything down in the script and take out a lot of dialogue, something he was not happy with as he wanted to keep the essence of his book intact.
In the end, Alan and A.F.N. had a lengthy discussion about the essence of the book and decided that by taking out the dialogue, it made it a very visceral film in the style of the visceral nature of the book.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Alan Clarke: Out of His Own Light (2016)
Featured review
Visceral terror
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.
helpful•10
- DanTheMan2150AD
- Nov 12, 2023
Details
- Runtime1 hour 7 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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