Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbaek, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Bokeem Woodbine, Iain De Caestecker, Dominic Applewhite, Gianny Taufer, Jacob Anderson, Erich Redman, Patrick Brammall, Mark McKenna.

The horrors of World War Two remain indelibly stamped, seared with painful fire of innate memory on Europe’s collective conscious and the world’s shame. There is no escaping the suffering, the revulsion, and history has shown us that if we start to forget what terrible crimes were committed, what possible actions could have been implemented in the name of furthering the Nazi ideology, then as is forever noted, we are in danger of repeating them and going deeper into the minds of evil.

There is surely no person on Earth today of any type of educational background that can not only recite stats and figures relating to the war on some level, but can discuss the reasons for war’s existence, that will be able to deliberate and argue the disgust and fear that comes from such malevolent criminality and inhuman behaviour. However, we also understand that there was so much done in the Nazi name that has not been mooted by the general public, that has only been debated in dark corners, the experiments, the tests on the local populaces which could lead to a resurgence in Frankenstein like science.

Horror is not just felt in waves of fear, the way in which a monster looms into view, it is how we perceive the ordinary being taken to a level to which our minds cannot cope with. It is to the not so large a leap in imagination that the film Overlord takes a deathly step into, that what the viewer sees as the next logical step that evil can take.

A group of American soldiers dropped into the French countryside on the eve of D-Day leads to the discovery of a heartless and cruel set of experiments on the populace of a small French village, and it is in that scenario that the fear of the monster can be seen to be expanded, to be taken to a place where the disease is a gross and despicable act of the nature of fascism, and for that the makers of the film have captured the point of horror; that not come with the mask of continued dread, but in the acceptance of one shock at a time.

With a superb performance by Jovan Adepo as Private Edward Boyce and a tight script which is not afraid to make the connection that sits between the genres of war and horror, Overlord is a film not to miss on either score.

Ian D. Hall