Richard Hawkins has found one of the genuinely stranger footnotes of WWII-era British statecraft and done almost nothing useful with it. The premise: the Ministry of Information, in some fever dream of morale management, commissions porn films for the armed forces, shot in the remote Orkneys with a ragtag crew of misfits. It sounds like a Blackadder episode conceived by someone who'd read too much Patrick Hamilton. It is not. The film's core problem is tonal incoherence. It arrives looking like a saucy period romp — the kind of thing the British film industry does on autopilot — and then refuses to be one, pivoting instead to trauma, sexual violence, and PTSD with none of the structural preparation those subjects require. The pivot isn't a subversion; it's a miscalculation. You need to establish the register you're working in before you can usefully complicate it. The cast earns sympathy. John McCrea's thin-lipped Captain Clune, wrestling with his own sexual anxiety while herding this absurd production, is a credible focal point. Ronni Ancona brings professional weariness to the makeup chair. Ben Bela Böhm as Max Meyer — the German-Jewish émigré director, the film's most intellectually interesting character — has real screen presence. The film keeps squandering them. There is one scene that works. Max coaching Holly (Natalie Quarry) through her close-up — how to inhabit the camera, how to manage dialogue when the dialogue is designed to disappear — achieves something the rest of the film doesn't: genuine intimacy between craft and performance. It has the texture of a real conversation about what filmmaking asks of bodies. That scene suggests what Think of England could have been in different hands or with a tighter script. The subplot involving Cpl Evans (Jack Bandeira) — a deeply disturbed former film actor whose trauma backstory is withheld until closing-credit title cards — is the film's most damaging structural choice. Withholding that information doesn't create suspense; it creates confusion and, worse, a sense that the film is ashamed of its own explanation. When Evans rushes out midway through filming because he spots someone outside, what follows is an "absurd parallel subplot" that the film has no room for and no way to resolve credibly. Hawkins scripted Paul Greengrass's The Theory of Flight, which at least knew what kind of film it was. Think of England doesn't. It's not bold enough in its seriousness to work as a trauma study, and it's too earnest about the darkness to function as black comedy. The "urban myth" it claims as its basis appears to exist primarily in promotional material for this film — which is either honest or quietly damning, depending on your generosity.
