10 Times Less Was Definitely More In Movies

Much of Dunkirk is spent dodging German gunfire and bombs from the Luftwaffe, but as anyone who has been to war will tell you, the scariest thing about being in battle is not the noise. It’s the silence.

Nolan knows this and uses the chilling absence of warfare in certain sequences to put you in the shoes of the terrified British servicemen waiting for evacuation from the shores of France in 1940.

A lesser director would have been afraid of losing an audience by pausing the action for too long, but Nolan has faith that the young soldiers primal desire to escape from those hellbent on killing them will provide enough thrills to carry the film.

Nolan also chooses not to show any German characters at all, their only appearances coming in their faceless attacks on the main characters. This once again makes the audience feel as though they themselves are trapped in a foreign land with an unknowable enemy bearing down on them. You’d be hard pressed to find fewer hard scares from a non-horror film.