The Trench (1999)

Official trailer

The Trench is William Boyd’s first and only film as director. He’s better known as a novelist. The whole movie takes place in one British trench in the forty-eight hours before the Somme offensive on July 1, 1916. There’s no combat in it. The combat is the thing the men are waiting for and the thing the audience never sees. The film ends with the whistle.

Daniel Craig plays Sergeant Telford Winter, seven years before Casino Royale and one year before anyone outside the British industry knew who he was. He’s doing the same compressed-fury performance he later brought to Bond, except in 1999 nobody had seen it yet. He’s the best thing in the film.

I respect this film more than I love it. Boyd picked a hard, spare idea and stuck to it, and there were moments when the waiting got so heavy I wanted the whistle just to end it.

I mean that as praise. It’s also why a 7 feels right to me: the film is admirable, a little stiff and rarely more than a filmed play.

The Confined Setting

Boyd commits to the trench. The camera never leaves it. You don’t see the German lines. You don’t see the British staff. You see a hundred yards of duckboard and dugout. The decision was partly budgetary and partly artistic, and it works because the script doesn’t try to break out.

The trade-off is that the film feels theatrical. Boyd is a novelist directing actors in a small space. The framing is competent but rarely cinematic. If you want the trench experience as immersion, 1917 has it. If you want the trench experience as anticipation of death, The Trench is closer.

I’d have liked a director with a better eye here. The single trench is a great constraint, and Boyd frames it like a stage set when it could have felt like a cage.

The Ensemble

The squad is the standard British war-film mix. The young one. The cynical one. The religious one. The officer who’s trying. The officer who’s not. Boyd doesn’t subvert these types, and that’s both a problem and not one. A problem because the film doesn’t surprise. Not a problem because the men in these trenches were these types, and the script is more interested in being true than being clever.

Paul Nicholls plays Private Billy Macfarlane, the seventeen-year-old who lied about his age. Julian Rhind-Tutt plays the officer. The supporting cast is mostly British TV actors doing solid work in small parts.

The types bothered me less than I expected. Nicholls as the underage private is the one who got to me, because the film never pushes him forward and I found myself counting the hours down for him.

The Ending

The whistle blows. The men climb the ladder. Cut to black. There’s no battle. There’s no postscript explaining that the British took more than fifty-seven thousand casualties on the first day of the Somme, nearly twenty thousand of them killed. The film trusts the audience to know.

It’s the right ending and it’s the only ending the film could have. Anything else would be sentimental. Boyd doesn’t have many cinematic instincts but this one was correct. That whistle is the best thing Boyd does, and it’s the moment I’d point anyone to. Everything I’d been dreading happens off screen, and the cut to black affects me more than any battle scene could have.

Is The Trench worth watching?

7/10. It’s a small, claustrophobic film that does what it sets out to do, and I think that discipline is both its best quality and its ceiling. It’s stagy where it should be cinematic and it never surprises me, and those two things keep it out of the 8s. I’d watch it for Craig’s coiled fury and for that ending. Skip it if you want spectacle.

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