Contact was certainly a visceral experience for my first Alan Clarke film, a powerful and yet unsensational starkly stripped-back war movie about British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. Clarke's use of minimal dialogue and fluid handheld camerawork lend the film an excellent sense of tension where it manages to create fear, confusion and bravery of uniformed soldiers fighting against an unseen enemy. Granted this means that the film ends up being an almost sparse, documentary-like experience but one that lends itself to the finely-judged performances of its cast, Sean Chapman especially. With its use of the endless and eerily beautiful Irish landscape, Contact manages to maintain its unending sense of dread through the eyes of the characterless soldier managing to convey all their experiences in a swift 66 minutes, from the boredom to the oddities and, most grippingly of all, the terror.

This title took me years to get. Having trawled every Militaria site to try and find it I found it unavailable on any Formats. It was shown on UK TV and I thought it may turn up in the next 20 or so years. Having stumbled upon it I found it a pleasant surprise and a shock to see many of the cast from the early Eastenders series. A rarity that takes pride of place in my Video Vault. And one that should be released along side the likes of classics Scum and Made in England. For realism this has to be one of those films that anyone really has to see. The American Vietnam alternatives would have to be the great movies How Sleep The Brave or the equally brilliant Australian SAS movie The Odd Angry Shot. For realism in the Northern Ireland situation Contact should have its place in Film history. Thought provoking and heart wrenching in its realism. Rest In Peace A F N Clarke.

i saw this film, it is very good, i liked the lack of music, and the intense atmosphere it created.would love to see it again.the scene where the soldier is blown up is graphic but is callous in its lack of compassion from the actors,id imagine such a terrible event would trigger more of a reaction in real life?but as a short film i imagine it captures the mood and anguish of the times quite well.as a film it may be slightly off topic now as the mood in northern Ireland is somewhat different to when the film was made, unfortunately the film is not available as a DVD purchase as it appears never to have been released commercially, but remains an interesting film for any one interested in understanding the role being played by the British army in the north of Ireland during these troubled times.