Welsh film provides weak Resistance

It's always going to be tricky to cut down a 300-page novel into a one-and-a-half hour film, so I might have watched Resistance with overly high hopes.

Owen Sheers' story is based around the assumption that D-Day has failed and that by October 1944 the German army has invaded the UK and forced its way into southern and western England.

In a remote valley in rural Herefordshire (and should that be Monmouthshire?) 26-year-old Sarah Lewis wakes up one morning to discover her husband and all the men from her village have vanished. The women they have left behind do not know where they have gone, but the assumption is they have taken to the hills to join the resistance movement.
Shortly afterwards a German reconnaissance unit arrives, led by Captain Albrecht (Tom Wlaschiha) and charged with seeking out a mysterious 'map'. On their way to the valley the troops have witnessed captured British resistance fighters being executed and the captain is hopeful that he and his men will be spared both attack by the locals and the arrival (and excesses) of the SS and Gestapo.

Unfortunately, while Albrecht and his comrades are shown to have a certain humanity – though they promptly dispatch the only resistance fighter they actually capture – they are a disappointingly one-dimensional bunch.

The same is true of the local women, who all too often are pictured staring moodily into space or across rain- and wind-lashed Welsh vistas. Andrea Riseborough, as Sarah, seems to spend half the film doing this while musing on whether her husband is alive or dead, whether she should return the affections of the German captain and whether she ought to accept help pulling stricken sheep out of snowdrifts.

With so much of the book cut, the moody staring seems a terrible waste of time; which could have been used to flesh out the characters a little or to explain why, if their quest for the 'map' is so important to the Nazi leadership, the German soldiers are so quickly forgotten by their superiors.

Michael Sheen (famed for his portrayals of Tony Blair and Brian Clough) brings a certain charisma to the role of resistance leader Tommy Atkins, but one wonders what he has told his youthful accomplice Iwan Rheon (George), who spends most of his time looking as shifty and suspicious as he possibly can, whether that is cycling around the countryside with a rifle slung over his back or peering with almost comic shock and outrage when he recognises a German soldier at an agricultural show.

There are small wardrobe oddities about the film, too. Captain Albrecht, for example, wears an army jacket, a paratrooper's smock and is seen as one stage riding a motorcycle with an SS numberplate; though he is presumably not one of its members. And at the beginning of the film, as the village men file away surreptitiously into the mountains in the dark, you can't help wonder why they've chosen to carry identical white kit-bags that are so clearly visible.

The Welsh scenery remains dramatic, if bleak, but otherwise the film is such a slow-burner as to be virtually extinguished.