War Book

Tom Harper’s 2015 British film takes place almost entirely in one room. Government officials sit through an exercise in which a nuclear threat escalates step by step, and they take the decisions: who is evacuated, what the public is told, at what point a response is authorised. The exercise at the table is invented; the practice it comes from is not. The film is talk rather than action, and what is genuinely frightening is how ordinary the people at the table are able to make these questions sound. Ben Chaplin, Kerry Fox, Adeel Akhtar, Shaun Evans and Phoebe Fox are around it. Jack Thorne wrote it after the release of the real war book files recording exercises of this kind from the sixties and seventies.