Passchendaele

Passchendaele (2008) is Paul Gross's Canadian war drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Gross wrote, directed and starred in the picture, drawing on what his own grandfather lived through in the Flanders mud of the First World War.

Sergeant Michael Dunne comes home shell-shocked and hollowed out after the fighting in Belgium. Recovering in Alberta, he falls for a nurse named Sarah, whose younger brother is desperate to enlist and whose father has been branded a German traitor by the town. Private grief and public shame pull all three back toward the front, into the autumn of 1917 where the advance drowned in rain-flooded craters. Plenty of men sank into the muck before a bullet ever reached them.

Gross refuses to dress the slaughter up as glory; he shows how the mud cancels every plan and how courage sits right beside futility. It is a film for anyone drawn to bleak Great War cinema told from an unusual Canadian angle. Stream Passchendaele (2008) online on iFILM.