Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) is a film you can watch online on iFILM, George Roy Hill's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel about Billy Pilgrim — a man who has come unstuck in time. One moment he's a child in upstate New York. The next he's a prisoner of war huddled in a Dresden meat locker as Allied bombs level the city above him. Then he's middle-aged, then he's on an alien planet. The sequence changes constantly, and that is precisely the point.

Vonnegut spent a decade trying to write about the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which he survived as a POW. The novel came out in 1969 as a dark, circling anti-war statement; the film preserves that tone exactly. Hill keeps the humour dry and refuses to let the camera turn any of it into heroism. Michael Sacks plays Billy in his screen debut, carrying the role with a kind of blank bewilderment that fits perfectly.

The film took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1972. It holds up as one of the more honest attempts to put Vonnegut on screen — strange, sad, and occasionally very funny in the way that only real despair can be. Watch Slaughterhouse-Five online on iFILM.