Dir/Wri: Richard Hawkins | UK Drama 102’ 2025
There are few more bizarre British propositions than the idea that, in the middle of the Second World War, the authorities might decide that what the troops really need is pornography. In Richard Hawkins’s Think of England, the stiff upper lip meets the stiffest of upper-lip hypocrisies, as a clandestine filmmaking operation is mounted to provide erotic entertainment for men fighting on the front line. What begins as an absurdist wartime joke gradually acquires a much darker edge.
Set in 1943, as the Allied invasion of Europe approaches, the film dispatches six mismatched individuals to a remote island in Orkney. Their secret assignment is to produce three pornographic shorts, one each for the Army, Navy and RAF, in the name of military morale. The unlikely company includes Captain Clune (John McCrea), a bureaucrat charged with overseeing the operation; Agnes Dupré (Ronni Ancona), a make-up and costume specialist accompanied by her young son Clifford (Ollie Maddigan); Max Meyer (Ben Bela Böhm), a German-Jewish film director; Holly Spurring (Natalie Quarry), an aspiring actress; and Corporal Evans (Jack Bandeira, a dead ringer for Buster Keaton)), a soldier whose war-damaged psyche makes him considerably more dangerous than his assignment might suggest.
The resulting collision of professional ambition, sexual embarrassment, military bureaucracy and private trauma gives Hawkins a compact ensemble drama in which everybody has something to hide. The camera may be rolling for the benefit of the boys at the front, but the real performances are taking place behind it.
The casting is one of the film’s chief assets. Jack Bandeira gives Corporal Evans a disturbing volatility, suggesting the psychological damage that war can inflict beneath the reassuring uniform. Natalie Quarry’s Holly, whose ambitions collide with the realities of the assignment, brings a different kind of vulnerability to the group. Ronni Ancona, so often associated with comic impersonation, has an opportunity to work in more dramatic territory as Agnes, while John McCrea makes Captain Clune’s official authority seem increasingly precarious. Ben Bela Böhm’s Max introduces the perspective of an émigré artist whose relationship with British authority is complicated by his German origins and Jewish identity.
Visually, Think of England makes brilliant use of confinement. The remote (Orkney?) island setting, with its exposed coastline and unforgiving weather, creates a sense of isolation essential to the story. Much of the action takes place inside an improvised studio, where the makeshift machinery of filmmaking becomes a miniature version of the wartime establishment itself: hierarchical, improvised and rather ridiculous.
The drab military interiors and restrained wartime palette contrast with the extraordinary nature of the enterprise being undertaken within them. Hawkins also toys with cinematic conventions, shifting between different visual approaches and occasionally unsettling our sense of where the camera — and the truth — really resides. The film’s production design helps establish a convincing period atmosphere without requiring lavish spectacle.
But did it really happen? The answer is that Think of England is an imagined drama, not a reconstruction of a documented operation involving these particular characters. The characters are fictional, and the filmmakers do not claim that Churchill’s government actually commissioned the three British pornographic films depicted here.
There is, however, a historical rationale behind the fiction. Wartime governments understood the importance of morale, propaganda and the management of sexual desire. Research into the use of erotic material by the German military helped inform the film’s premise. That does not establish that the specific British operation portrayed on screen took place. Hawkins is playing with the boundary between historical plausibility and invention, inviting us to question how readily we accept an outrageous story when it arrives dressed in the trappings of period authenticity.
His central joke has genuine bite: a country prepared to send young men to kill in the name of civilisation must somehow reconcile that violence with its insistence on maintaining respectable standards at home. Cinema becomes the perfect vehicle for exposing the contradiction. It can glorify war, manufacture national heroes and police sexual morality, all while pretending to be a transparent reflection of reality.
The danger is that the provocative premise promises a more straightforward comedy than Hawkins actually delivers. This is no breezy British farce in which embarrassed officers and enthusiastic amateurs stumble through an indecent assignment. The atmosphere darkens, violence and psychological distress intrude, and the humour becomes increasingly uncomfortable. The concentration on a small group also occasionally restricts the film’s momentum.
Yet that discomfort is part of the design. Think of England is interested in the gap between what a society says it believes and what it is prepared to do when survival is at stake. Its most provocative suggestion is that the stories we accept as history may be shaped as much by our appetite for a convincing narrative as by the evidence.
Sly, visually assured and often unsettling, this is an intriguing piece of independent British filmmaking. Its greatest achievement is not persuading us that this extraordinary mission happened exactly as shown, but making us question why we were so ready to believe it might have.
In UK cinemas from 6 November 2026