Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.military.com
A depth charge explodes somewhere outside a submarine’s hull. Four soldiers stare through a tank’s gunsight, uncertain whether the next person they encounter is an enemy. An American sniper lies wounded behind a crumbling wall, knowing that moving even a few inches could get him killed.
Some of the most intense war movies give their characters remarkably little room to move.
While Hollywood often relies on massive battle sequences, explosions and thousands of extras to recreate warfare, a handful of filmmakers have discovered that trapping soldiers in confined spaces can be considerably more frightening. For viewers looking for something unsettling and tense, these five military thrillers deliver plenty of suspense.
1. ‘Das Boot’ (1981)
Few war movies capture the terror of being trapped underwater better than Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot.
Based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel, the German film follows the crew of submarine U-96 during a dangerous World War II patrol in the Atlantic.
Jürgen Prochnow plays the boat’s commanding officer, an experienced submariner responsible for keeping his young crew alive as they hunt Allied shipping and attempt to avoid British warships.
Much of the film unfolds inside the submarine’s narrow passageways, where sailors eat, sleep and work in conditions that would be miserable even without the threat of combat.
When Allied destroyers begin dropping depth charges, the cramped interior becomes terrifying. The crew listens for explosions while the submarine shakes violently around them. Leaking pipes, failing equipment and the pressure of the surrounding ocean compound the danger.
Petersen keeps the audience aboard U-96 so long that the vessel almost becomes another character. Every compartment is familiar by the time something starts going wrong.
One particularly harrowing sequence follows the crew as their damaged submarine sinks to a depth far beyond its intended operating limits.
Das Boot received six Academy Award nominations and remains one of cinema’s most celebrated submarine movies. Its influence extends to modern submarine thrillers. In a 2019 interview with Military.com, Hunter Killer director Donovan Marsh named Das Boot among his favorite films and discussed the challenges of creating suspense aboard a submarine.
2. ‘Lebanon’ (2009)
Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz took the confined-space approach even further with Lebanon, a war drama inspired by his experiences as a tank gunner during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Almost the entire movie takes place inside a single Israeli tank.
The four-man crew enters Lebanon in the conflict’s opening stages, supporting ground troops as they move through hostile territory.
Their view of the outside world is restricted almost entirely to the tank’s gunsight. That’s an incredibly effective decision.
The audience sees civilians, armed fighters and devastated buildings through the same narrow perspective as the soldiers operating the vehicle. Determining who poses a threat becomes increasingly difficult, and mistakes have devastating consequences.
Inside the tank, the crew argues, panics and struggles to follow orders. The vehicle protects them from enemy fire, but its crew has little understanding of what’s happening beyond the armor. Maoz also makes the tank itself an uncomfortable environment. Its interior is crowded, filthy and increasingly chaotic as the operation deteriorates.
The film won the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, becoming the first Israeli-produced movie to receive the festival’s top prize.
Lebanon is particularly effective because it captures the limitations of armored warfare from the perspective of soldiers who can see only a fraction of the battlefield around them.
3. ‘The Wall’ (2017)
Director Doug Liman needed little more than two actors, a pile of rubble and an unseen enemy to create one of the more unusual Iraq War thrillers.
The Wall stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sgt. Allen Isaac and John Cena as Staff Sgt. Shane Matthews, two American soldiers investigating a suspicious site in the Iraqi desert. Shane Matthews and Isaac are two American soldiers investigating a suspicious site in the Iraqi desert.
After Matthews is shot by an Iraqi sniper, Isaac attempts to reach him but is wounded himself. His only protection is a crumbling stone wall that barely separates him from the enemy’s line of fire.
With limited water, damaged communications equipment and a serious injury, Isaac faces an increasingly desperate fight to stay alive.
The unseen sniper eventually begins communicating with him over the radio, turning the encounter into a psychological battle as the American soldier tries to determine where his opponent is hiding.
Liman keeps the action centered on Isaac’s tiny patch of cover. The surrounding desert is wide open, yet the character might as well be trapped inside a locked room.
In a 2017 interview with Military.com, Liman explained that he wanted audiences to experience what it felt like to be pinned down by enemy fire. He also described consulting soldiers, veterans and military families while preparing the movie.
The result is an unusually stripped-down military thriller that relies on patience, uncertainty and the terrifying consequences of making the wrong move.
4. ‘Greyhound’ (2020)
Tom Hanks has appeared in some of the most recognizable World War II productions ever made, but Greyhound offers a particularly intense look at naval combat.
Hanks plays Cmdr. Ernest Krause, a fictional Navy officer assigned to escort an Allied convoy across the Atlantic in 1942. The convoy consists of 37 merchant and troop ships carrying supplies and personnel desperately needed for the war effort.
Unfortunately, Krause must guide them through an area of the Atlantic beyond Allied air cover, where German U-boats wait. Much of the film takes place aboard the destroyer USS Keeling, whose radio call sign is Greyhound.
Krause and his crew spend nearly every waking moment tracking submarine contacts, interpreting sonar reports, maneuvering their ship and trying to protect the convoy from attack. The tension comes from the constant stream of incomplete information.
An unidentified contact might be a submarine preparing to fire a torpedo. A sudden maneuver could expose another ship to danger. Meanwhile, the crew becomes increasingly exhausted as the attacks continue.
The film moves outside the destroyer for its action sequences, but the bridge remains the story’s center. Krause must make decisions about threats he frequently cannot see.
Hanks was so interested in C.S. Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd that he adapted the book into a screenplay himself, eventually bringing the project to the screen in 2020. Greyhound premiered on Apple TV+ that July.
5. ‘Beneath Hill 60’ (2010)
Being trapped aboard a submarine is frightening enough. Imagine spending months digging tunnels beneath enemy positions while knowing German soldiers are doing the same thing. That’s the premise of Beneath Hill 60, an Australian World War I film based on the experiences of Capt. Oliver Woodward and the 1st Australian Tunneling Company.
Brendan Cowell stars as Woodward, a mining engineer who joins the Australian military and is assigned to dangerous underground operations along the Western Front.
The tunnellers’ mission is to dig beneath German defensive positions and place enormous explosive charges that can be detonated before an infantry assault. Their work is extraordinarily dangerous. Tunnels can collapse without warning. Enemy tunnellers might be digging only a few feet away. Soldiers must also contend with flooding, poor ventilation and the possibility of accidentally detonating explosives underground.
The film includes aboveground scenes and flashbacks to Woodward’s civilian life, but its underground sequences are the most unsettling.
The historical operation culminated in June 1917, when British and Commonwealth forces detonated 19 mines beneath German positions at the beginning of the Battle of Messines. According to the Australian War Memorial, Woodward activated the firing switch for the mines beneath Hill 60.
Beneath Hill 60 highlights an often-overlooked form of military service, where soldiers fought an underground war largely invisible to the men in the trenches above. It’s also the perfect example of how a war movie can turn darkness, silence and the sound of someone digging nearby into genuine horror.
War Movies Don’t Need Monsters to Be Terrifying
These five movies cover different conflicts, countries and military specialties, but they share an understanding of what makes combat frightening.
In Das Boot, the enemy is somewhere above the submarine. In Lebanon, the danger appears through a narrow gunsight. The Wall turns a few feet of masonry into a soldier’s entire world, while Greyhound makes every unidentified sonar contact a potential disaster.
And in Beneath Hill 60, the threat might be waiting just beyond the next layer of earth.
None requires a supernatural monster or haunted battlefield to create suspense. The dangers facing their characters are rooted in warfare itself, where limited visibility, failing equipment and exhaustion can be just as deadly as enemy fire.
For anyone looking for a military movie that delivers horror-film tension, these five are worth adding to your watchlist.
