REVIEW

FOLLOWING Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a film artist is carved in stone – untouchable, monumental and hard-hitting. Without pedalling backwards in the slightest, Widows takes him in a whole new direction. It proves there’s another side to McQueen who’s always been bursting to get out – the same one whose industry secret is that he’s always itched to make a James Bond type movie, and now very possibly has.

The tense and clenched opening of Hunger has a prison officer checking under his motor vehicle for concealed bombs. In Widows, one goes off within the first 10 minutes, flinging an exploding armoured van towards the camera. Dramatic fragments, blasted towards the viewer, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a conundrum in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, the movie gets by on no more than electric confidence, technical virtuosity, and a screen cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

With some surprise, and of all sources, McQueen and his co-writer, Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, have turned to a classic of ITV drama from 1983, the 12-part series of the same name created by Lynda La Plante, about the aftermath of a botched armed robbery. The setting has shifted to present-day Chicago, but the structure and theme broadly remains. As before, three widows are left shell-shocked in the rubble – Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), none of them previously well-known to each other or at all involved in their husbands’ criminal dealings.

Financially shafted, and in Veronica’s case threatened with violence by an unscrupulous local politician (Brian Tyree Henry), they join forces to pay him and each other off, following blueprints for a planned heist that Veronica’s husband (Liam Neeson) mysteriously bequeathed to her in a safe-deposit box.

This – along with two major sub-plots – is juggled hypnotically, with pacing and precision. If it sounds as though Davis has been at all left out in these manoeuvres, she hasn’t: her character, more screwed over than anyone, is not just prime victim but prime mover, an aggrieved mastermind with a white terrier called Olivia (who tips her off to at least one severe shock) rarely far from her bosom. As she goes along, her performance stealthily dominates, without preventing anyone else in the ensemble from seizing their moments to shine.

Rodriguez, debatably, brings less novelty or shading to her role but Debicki – at one point convincingly posing as a Polish mail-order bride – is tremendous.

The real star, though, is McQueen himself. His steely grasp of stakes, pace and setting never falters: the ringleader of his own trusty crew, he has the dream team of editor Joe Walker, cinematographer Sean Bobbit and composer Hans Zimmer to do his very precise bidding. Few but McQueen would have the nerve to shoot a long dialogue scene in one take from outside the moving car where it’s happening, to remind us pointedly of the minor character who’s driving, and to take note of the few blocks separating the projects from the gentrified district up the street – all to illustrate and ironise the subject of the conversation. Not that it’s a race, but his clever showmanship leaves the likes of The Departed panting in the rear-view mirror.

Widows was previously shown at the London Film Festival earlier this month and becomes available on general release in November.

Verdict: A super-charged crime epic with Steve McQueen in full-throttle mode. An explosive remake of the 1983 TV series Widows created by Lynda La Plante.

★★★★★