Grenfell by Steve McQueen review – an unflinching film that makes the horror palpable

At first, we hear birdsong as the screen lights up. The approach begins at London’s edge, passing over a mosaic of housing developments and the last fields, giving way to golf courses and playing fields and factory estates. There are traffic sounds and distant sirens, a helicopter passing over, its sound fading with it. Our approach is slow and low in the early winter afternoon, the distant horizon muffled by pollution. Here comes Wembley stadium, there on the right, just before we make a small turn and head over Willesden and Kensal Green, crossing the Westway.

Distantly at first, barely visible between other towers, a blackened smudge heaves into view and the sound dies. A red underground train passes through a station and the red cabin of an external lift descends the side of the blackened, burned-out tower. Sunlight penetrates the interior through the spaces where windows once were, falling on bare floors and the cavernous spaces that used to be carpeted and where interior walls, kitchens, beds, furniture and decorations once stood. Daylight excavates the gloom. Lattices of internal metal scaffolding shore up ceilings and workers are occasionally glimpsed among it all. Then they’re gone. We do not linger either, as the camera makes its rounds. And all around are other buildings, other windows looking on.

All trace of those that lived and died in Grenfell Tower are gone. Who knows what detritus fills those piles of neatly taped-up rose-coloured rubbish sacks waiting to be shifted out. The camera doesn’t pause, in the single, long take that glides and swoops and passes. Its gaze is unflinching. We circle, almost glancing the corners of the tower as we approach and retreat and turn, never looking away. The clumps of black, tarry residue from the combustible insulation behind the plastic-cored cladding system have welded themselves to the concrete and steel structure of the tower. Incompetence and corruption are at the heart of this disaster, in which 72 people died, making it the country’s worst since the second world war. It happened on the night of 14 June 2017.

In 2009, Steve McQueen made Static, a seven-minute film shot from a moving helicopter. The camera swooped, wallowed and turned about the Statue of Liberty in New York, came close and swept away, constantly filming the monument, newly reopened to the public after seven years of closure following 9/11. Static was loud with engine noise, the thwap of helicopter blades and constant wind. One thought of police surveillance helicopters and gunships, as well as of the statue as a symbol of freedom, and the hopes of arriving immigrants.

But most of this film, called Grenfell, is silent. The camerawork is almost stately, a slow examination of textures, details and context. The camera probes and passes, holds and magnifies. The helicopter casts no shadows, neither on the ground nor on the sides of the tower itself. The camera is our eye. Nothing intervenes. But as soon as you alight on a detail – or glimpse the wrecked interior and ruined surface, the smoke-stained but otherwise intact concrete, the tattered bits of aluminium and congealed polyethylene insulation, the burnt and melted cladding – you are moved on, going from sunlight to shadow and back again, as we circumnavigate the building.

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Grenfell is painful to watch. The approach is almost beautiful and mesmerising, just as any view of a city is at the end of a flight. And then the horror, which is itself palpable, even as the work crews labour to clean up and make the structure safe. McQueen filmed Grenfell six months after the fire. They had already begun hoarding the lower floors in white panels, a task that would eventually see all 24 storeys wrapped and hidden from view.

It is difficult to look but impossible to turn away. McQueen holds our attention, keeps us remembering what happened here. Towards the end, a whole face of the building, seen front-on, fills the screen, except for the crenellated corners to either side, where silhouetted and coruscated bits of material reach into the west London sky. We hang there for a moment as the sound returns, with the rising moan of a tube train below. The camera stops, sways slightly and stops again. The moment is giddying, after all that movement. The kind of giddiness you get when you’ve just heard some terrible news.

And then it is over. There are no credits, neither at the beginning nor at the end of the 24-minute film. Grenfell is not a documentary. There is no voiceover, no detailing of what happened and why, or how the fire started and spread. Nothing about the shoddy and careless installation of the cladding or why it was wholly inappropriate, or why it was allowed and rubber-stamped. Nothing about the companies that made or supplied the cladding, or installed it. Nothing about the absence of fire alarms or exit routes, nothing about Kensington and Chelsea’s dismissal of the tenants’ fears before the fire, nothing about the difficulty of containing the fire as it swept up the sides of the building or how it was accelerated by gaps around the windows. Nothing about the borough’s housing policies and attitudes towards its poorer and often immigrant citizens.

Justice still seems a long way off, four years after the publication of the damning first report, and before the final report to be published later this year. A criminal investigation is still ongoing. What we have instead is this carcass, standing in the mild December sunshine. On the way out of the screening, at the Serpentine Gallery, we are confronted with a commemorative text in memory of those who lost their lives, and three long rows of the 72 names. In a passionate accompanying essay, sociologist Paul Gilroy writes of Grenfell as a “charred obscenity”. Leaving, I’m aware of what is just over the horizon to the north. Grenfell stays with me, and stays with London, however much they cover it up.

• Grenfell by Steve McQueen is at Serpentine Gallery, London, from 7 April to 10 May.