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Seventy-two people died in the fire that consumed the Grenfell Tower block in west London early in the summer of 2017. Now the coolly incandescent feature-length documentary Grenfell: Uncovered provides a matter-of-fact and frequently distressing account of what happened on that night and afterwards, as told by witnesses, survivors, victims’ relatives and the emergency services who attended the scene. It is undoubtedly powerful, and it channels its evident fury into a greater purpose by making plain the complex findings of the official Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which took seven years and published its final report in September last year.
Director Olaide Sadiq has earlier production credits on the series 999: What’s Your Emergency? and Ambulance, and for the first hour or so, this film takes a similar approach. It lays out, with tense precision, what happened eight years ago on June 14. The time flashes up on screen, punctuated by recordings of 999 calls interwoven with video clips taken on phones by passers-by and neighbours that show the rapid spread of the fire. Television news reports show just how completely the flames took hold of the building, which had been clad in cheap, highly flammable materials, in order to make it look nicer, compared to the brand new leisure centre next door.
Phone footage of flats filling with smoke and, later, of a family’s much-delayed escape down darkened stairwells thick with fumes is impossible to forget. The accounts given by the survivors and firefighters are devastating, and if there were any lingering doubts about whether it is right to revive once again the suffering endured by Grenfell residents, then their willingness to speak about their experiences, and to remember and memorialise those family members and friends killed in the fire, renders this point moot. If they want their stories to be heard, then it seems incumbent on the viewer to hear and to witness their stories.
The film is upsetting and harrowing throughout, but it is driven by a clear sense of a need for justice, and an acknowledgment of the lack of justice to date. Though Mr Bates vs The Post Office was a drama, and this is a documentary, Grenfell: Uncovered may well have a similar effect on the public’s understanding of what happened in 2017. It is a tale of British society in the 21st century, of what and whom we choose to value and discard. In its third act, the film makes a clear and convincing case for how the various acts of failure, neglect and outright corruption, on political, institutional and corporate levels, are all connected. Then-Prime Minister Theresa May gives an interview, though, tellingly, she is the only politician to appear.
Each year, on the anniversary of the fire, former residents, survivors and supporters take part in a silent walk as a show of unity and an act of protest. Documentaries must offer a right to reply when criticising individual figures and businesses, and in this film, when those replies are broadcast on screen, they are cut with footage from one of those silent marches. It is a subtle but damning directorial choice. The film ends, as it should, with the names of the dead.
★★★★☆
On Netflix now
