The film begins somewhere outside London, high in a helicopter moving gradually through a bright winter dawn. The trees are bare, an occasional car glints way down on the outskirts below. The ambient thrum of traffic and planes grows louder as the city gets inexorably closer and closer, but so slowly that the audience in the specially constructed cinema in the Serpentine Gallery start to crane and squint to pick out the tower on the dense horizon.
Steve McQueen’s Grenfell takes its time to find the blackened block, rising like a monumental oil rig from the seas of west London before it was covered up. But his film soon locks fast to its subject and the soundtrack abruptly cuts. The camera begins to circle the tower, round and round and around the site where 72 people died on 14 June 2017, in a stark commemorative silence.
