Film Review: DO NOT HESITATE: A Valiant Anti-War Effort, But Nothing New to Add [Tribeca 2021]

Do Not Hesitate Review

Do Not Hesitate (2021) Film Review from the 20th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Shariff Korver, starring Joes Brauers, Spencer Bogaert, Tobias Kersloot, and Omar Alwan.

We all know “war is hell”. We’ve all seen that phrase plastered somewhere before. Clichéd as it may be it’s still the truth, and that fact should be routinely acknowledged. The question is: can you acknowledge a cliché without necessarily becoming one?

Do Not Hesitate is one of hundreds of anti-war films out there, and director Shariff Korver knows how to be tactful about his narrative’s immediate spatiality. It’s the peripheries that remain disappointingly blurred, which may leave one asking for a bit of a sharper focus.

On deployment in an unnamed Middle Eastern desert, a Dutch convoy breaks down amidst a relocation trek. The soldiers are ordered to stay with the vehicle until help arrives, for fear that marauders or enemy forces might ransack the expensive military equipment. Given the precarity of their exposed position between two mountain ranges, with limited supplies, and a rescue team that keep getting delayed, the troops’ irritation and anxiety starts to skyrocket.

In a clumsy mix-up, soldier Erik (Joes Brauers) ends up killing an untethered goat. He and the other troops try to hide the evidence but it’s to no avail, as the goat’s teenage owner (Omar Alwan) shows up angrily demanding amends. Unsatisfied with the repayment the military offers him, he hovers around the convoy and harasses them – much to the chagrin of the more paranoid and xenophobic soldiers like Roy (Spencer Bogaert).

After another day the commanding officer decides on a reconnaissance mission, leaving Erik, Roy, and Thomas (Tobias Kersloot) to guard the convoy in the meantime. All the while, the teen goat herder continuously hovers by. Time drags on and supplies dwindle down to nothing, wearing thin the patience of both the teenager and the remaining troops. For them to survive they’ll have to resort to extreme measures, but that will also include the loss of their humanity.

I can’t sign on to a handful of Letterboxd users’ readings of this as a stealth remake/rip-off of Beau Travail, as I haven’t seen that particular Claire Denis film yet (yes I know, Denis-heads, I’m very behind on her filmography and I apologize for my shortcomings as a cinephile). But there is another war drama that Do Not Hesitate calls to mind: Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon.

Do Not Hesitate interprets “single location war film” a bit more traditionally (as opposed to Lebanon keeping its protagonists and its viewers trapped inside a tank for everything but its bookending shots),  but they both use their claustrophobic settings as personified extensions of their characters’ own fears and doubts. While Maoz’s protagonists feel trapped in the dark, dank interiors of a metallic beast, Korver’s are conversely trapped in and by open space: constantly exposed in a bright and barren valley situated between jagged mountains, a spot that offers clear views and plenty of cover to the troops’ potential adversaries. Lebanon’s soldiers see everything unfold in front of them but can do little about it; Do Not Hesitate’s soldiers see nothing unfold, and they don’t know what to do about that. Nadim Carlsen’s cinematography helps spur along on those feelings of entrapment, too, with the 4:3 aspect ratio making even the widest of landscape shots feel menacingly constricted.

But unlike with Lebanon, where Maoz makes a relentless anti-war and potentially anti-Zionist case (even spiking it with moments of mild absurdity to hammer home the horrors of it), Do Not Hesitate is more or less straightforward in its approach. Karver, working off a screenplay from Jolein Laarman, doesn’t shy away from showing us either the anxiety of the soldiers’ situation or the ultimate brutality of their actions (with the climactic scene being incredibly heart-wrenching), but such matter-of-factness only allows for limited emotional engagement on our part as the audience.

Do Not Hesitate offers little in revelations beyond that which any politically-aware person should already know, which is that war is bad and detrimental to all its players. The film barely reckons with the devastating effects that military occupation can have beyond the surface-level violence such a set-up enacts. Not that Karver and Laarman are required to do perform such reckoning, but it does beg the question of what exactly we’re meant to engage with and/or take away from it beyond a basic moral lesson – especially since the soldiers’ own psychological baggage is only given half-hearted diligence in the final act of the film. It also doesn’t help that the Dutch army’s mission is assumed to be one of general “peace-keeping” in a vaguely Middle Eastern location, which conflates any vague historical context into an ambiguous blob that prohibits deeper sociological inquiry. (Although that could be lost in translation, as I must admit that I know nothing about Dutch foreign policy.)

At its core Do Not Hesitate is still a valiant effort, and its taut hour-and-a-half runtime certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s just a bummer that it contributes little to the already-extant anti-war conversation beyond mildly indulgent meditations on trauma. If anything really makes one feel claustrophobic, it’s the structural pigeon-holing of subgenre that is the indie war film.

Rating: 6/10

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