Warfare (Film): Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza’s Unflinching Descent into Combat Chaos

Warfare movie release date: April 11, 2025 (US), April 18, 2025 (UK)
Directed by: Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza
Production: DNA Films, distributed by A24
Genre: Iraq War movie / modern war film
Runtime: 95 minutes
Notable Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini, Noah Centineo

A24 has a reputation for disrupting genres, but with Warfare, it doesn’t just shake the war film formula—it detonates it.

Co-directed by Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, this new A24 war movie is as far from Hollywood gloss as you can get.

Set during a real-life 2006 mission in Ramadi, the Iraq War backdrop is less historical lesson and more battleground for sensory assault.

A Warfare Movie That Refuses to Look Away

Warfare (film) is structured more like a flashback nightmare than a screenplay. You won’t find the usual war movie beats: no mission brief, no tearful farewells, no victory laps.

Instead, it drops you straight into a surveillance mission gone wrong, told largely in real time. It’s ninety-five minutes of tension so relentless you might forget to breathe.

Rather than focus on ideology or politics, Warfare the movie fixates on one thing—how combat feels from the inside. It’s not about what war means. It’s about what it does to your body, your hearing, your grip on the moment.

Realism with Scars, Not Stats

This Iraq War movie isn’t interested in tidy accuracy. As co-director Mendoza has said, these are memories—messy, subjective, raw.

That rawness carries through every frame. The camera moves like it’s panicked. The sound design rattles like tinnitus. And when a soldier gets hit, the moment doesn’t cut to black—it stays.

You’ll hear grenades rolling across the floor before you see them. You’ll feel the fear before the action even starts.

Garland, no stranger to cerebral intensity (Annihilation, Civil War), brings the dread.

Mendoza brings the trauma. Together, they produce a war film that feels more like a horror movie—unforgiving and claustrophobic.

A Cast Built for Chaos

D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Aaron Mackenzie, Adain Bradley, and Michael Gandolfini in Warfare (2025)Photo by Courtesy of A24 — D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Aaron Mackenzie, Adain Bradley, and Michael Gandolfini in Warfare (2025) Photo by Courtesy of A24

D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai portrays Mendoza’s alter ego with contained intensity, while Will Poulter’s Erik exudes the quiet weight of leadership.

Cosmo Jarvis adds tension as a haunted sniper, and Noah Centineo, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini, and Taylor John Smith help round out the platoon.

These aren’t characters you get to know in depth, but they don’t need long monologues to register as real.

There’s no glamour here. These are young men yelling over gunfire, bleeding out in stairwells, and scrambling to keep each other alive.

Beyond the Battlefield

One of the most affecting moments in Warfare involves an Iraqi family whose home becomes an unintentional stronghold.

Their terror is palpable. And the film doesn’t offer easy answers—it just presents the unyielding proximity of civilian life to war zones.

It’s a subtle but damning indictment of how modern warfare encroaches on the innocent.

This new Navy SEAL movie also avoids the common trap of glorifying violence. It doesn’t score kills with triumphant music. It doesn’t cut away from suffering.

The film’s most powerful moments come not from combat, but from silence—when radios hiss, when breath catches, when pain is drawn out without resolution.

Why Warfare Hits Harder Than Most War Movies of 2023–2025

Critics have already noted the film’s refusal to pander. In his New Yorker review, Justin Chang described Warfare as a “hyperrealist rebuke” of the American war movie—a sentiment echoed across outlets.

Unlike many modern warfare movies, this isn’t about the war. It’s about the wound.

And yet, despite its intensity, Warfare has struck a chord. It’s already drawing comparisons to classics like The Hurt Locker and Jarhead, while establishing its own identity in the growing canon of Iraq War movies.

Call it what you like: a war movie, a military movie of 2025, a visceral Iraq war film. Just don’t call it entertainment.

Warfare is closer to a bodycam reel than a theatrical feature—and that’s what gives it power. You don’t walk away with closure. You walk away shaken.