“A stunning visual and serious music treat.”-Variety

Jarman's nonnarrative lament to the tragedy of war opens with an elderly soldier, played by Laurence Olivier in his screen farewell, reciting poet Wilfred Owen's “Strange Meeting”: “It seemed that out of battle I had escaped.” Throughout the film-the soldier's remembrances?-we hear Benjamin Britten's famed oratorio, “War Requiem,” which draws on Owen's poetry, while witnessing Jarman's poetic cinematic response. Tableaux detailing Owen's life and death at twenty-five in the trenches are interwoven with archival footage of war's devastation from World War I onward. Tilda Swinton plays a nurse; the dark-haired Nathaniel Parker, Wilfred Owens; and Owen Teale, the Unknown Soldier.