Think of England Review: Manufacturing Desire Among the Damaged

Holly Spurring tries different accents for a woman whose future has already been written: her husband will return from the war, and she will want him. An aspiring actress employed to perform in a pornographic film, she approaches the assignment with an earnestness that makes its circumstances painful.

Max Meyer, her director, helps her address the camera and handle dialogue in close-up. For a little while, the work requires someone to listen to her. Natalie Quarry keeps Holly’s ambition alive beneath her defensiveness; she wants to become another Marlene Dietrich, even here, with this material.

Max’s attention has its own sorrow. A German Jewish refugee played by Ben Bela Böhm, he possesses professional knowledge that remains useful in exile, while knowledge of his family arrives in a letter saying they have been “resettled.” The word gives catastrophe the texture of an administrative arrangement. His lessons with Holly cannot repair that absence, and Hawkins leaves a painful distance between the help Max can offer and the help he cannot give. He can teach her how to speak to an unseen audience. His relatives have been placed beyond the reach of an answer.

These encounters take place within Richard Hawkins’s Think of England, which imagines six people sent to an isolated Orkney location during the Second World War to produce erotic films for British servicemen. There will be versions for the army, navy, and air force, with changes of uniform accommodating the same promise of domestic welcome.

Captain Clune, a Ministry of Information officer played by John McCrea, must get the work completed. Prospects of forgiveness and fresh starts help secure the participants’ cooperation. Their consent has been arranged under circumstances that make refusal costly, while the films require them to present desire as uncomplicated.

The physical work of shooting gives this contradiction a persuasive setting. Cameras and recording equipment must be prepared; bodies must become performances that can be photographed. Hawkins lets us attend to the apparatus through which a private encounter becomes an official product.

Sarah Cunningham’s richly colored interiors make the fabricated domestic world attractive, while the darker vegetation and surrounding water give the island a different emotional temperature. The set offers a version of home to people who cannot readily leave it. Within that enclosure, Holly’s wish to acquire a skill feels precariously personal, something she can still claim amid the demands placed upon her.

Her fellow performer makes that claim dangerous. Corporal Harry Evans, played by Jack Bandeira, moves between withdrawn stillness and furious eruption, so that even his quiet carries the possibility of interruption. Holly has to attempt sexual intimacy with someone she fears.

This makes the rehearsal’s concern with convincing behavior almost unbearable: what the camera needs from her must be produced in the presence of a threat. Bandeira’s stare and abrupt outbursts establish that threat without needing constant activity. McCrea’s Clune exerts a different pressure through the authority of the assignment, asking the production to continue when its working conditions have become frightening.

Evans’s scars and brief flashbacks make his wartime injury visible, yet the screenplay is less precise about the passage from suffering to cruelty. His pain and his responsibility need room to exist separately. Instead, the deferred explanations invite the weight of his past to do too much interpretive work. Bandeira makes the other characters’ fear credible; the writing struggles to give Evans an interior life as particular as the danger he presents. The distinction matters when Holly must bear the immediate consequences of behavior whose explanation is still being withheld from us.

His excursions away from the production weaken that concentration further. Violence elsewhere on the island extends the war’s reach, yet it also removes Evans from the room where his presence creates the most difficult relationships. On set, people have to work around him, negotiate with him, and expose themselves to him.

Away from it, brutality becomes a separate strand whose horrors compete with those negotiations. The later rush of revelations gives the narrative additional information and activity, but leaves earlier passages feeling dependent upon explanations still to come. The closing character notices carry psychological weight that the encounters themselves needed to sustain.

The music supplies another, less settled register. Songs such as “Mad About the Boy” and “Anything Goes” preserve the pleasures of the period alongside the assignment’s sexual awkwardness and growing distress. Their familiarity offers a social world beyond military orders, one in which desire might still belong to leisure, flirtation, or play. The film has difficulty keeping that world emotionally available as Evans’s violence occupies increasing space. Its movement toward darkness is clear enough; the modulation within the darkness is thinner. Repeated danger begins to restrict what we can discover about people who are already afraid.

Agnes, the hair and makeup worker played by Ronni Ancona, brings this restriction into the group’s capacity for care. Her practical kindness comes under pressure when the rewards attached to completing the mission are threatened. Helping someone becomes entangled with keeping the work moving, and the film finds an uncomfortable uncertainty there: a reassuring presence may still serve an arrangement that is hurting its participants. Clifford’s hopes of reaching Hollywood lend the production a different vulnerability. The machinery that looks to him like an entrance into a larger life also requires him to witness experiences his enthusiasm has scarcely prepared him to understand.

An evening of dancing allows these people to share an activity that does not require them to manufacture intimacy for soldiers elsewhere. There is relief in seeing companionship take a bodily form, however temporary, among people brought together through necessity and promises.

They have something to lose together now, beyond their individual bargains with the authorities. Hawkins gives this possibility enough time to be felt, though little room to develop beside the accumulating violence. The pleasure remains provisional: Agnes’s care and Holly’s ambition are still exposed to those bargains while the group briefly finds a rhythm it can share.

Think of England opens in UK cinemas on November 6, 2026, through Tull Stories, following a preview at the Greenwich Film Festival. Directed by Richard Hawkins, the World War II drama thriller is inspired by historical rumors and follows a disparate group of individuals sent to a remote location on a secret government assignment to produce morale-boosting propaganda films for soldiers on the front lines.

Full Credits

• Title: Think of England

• Distributor: Tull Stories

• Release date: November 6, 2026

• Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes (105 minutes)

• Director: Richard Hawkins

• Writers: Richard Hawkins

• Producers and Executive Producers: Richard Hawkins, and production team

• Cast: Jack Bandeira, Natalie Quarry, John McCrea, Ronni Ancona, Ben Bella Bohm, Ollie Madigan