The War Below

The War Below (2021) is a British war drama you can watch online on iFILM. It's 1917 and the Western Front hasn't moved in months. Rather than send more men over the top, the army turns to a handful of Yorkshire coal miners who dig a tunnel under no man's land to plant explosives beneath the German line at Messines.

Down there the fight is different. Wet clay, thinning air, collapses, and enemy sappers boring toward you through the dark. William Hawking (Sam Hazeldine) understands the seams better than any officer, yet the orders come from men who have never set foot in a pit. Tom Goodman-Hill and Kris Hitchen round out the crew that has to decide whose judgment to trust thirty metres underground.

Director J.P. Watts keeps the story small and airless, built around one of the strangest operations of the First World War. No sweeping battle vistas — just the crushing tightness of the shaft, where silence frightens more than gunfire. A good pick if you like your war films grimy and human rather than heroic. Stream The War Below (2021) online on iFILM.