Think of England review – far-fetched tale of state-sponsored second world war porn turns deadly serious

Apocryphal plans to send an arousing morale booster to troops battling the Nazis make scant sense, and nor does the resulting movie

Some potentially interesting ideas here and a good cast … but the whole thing disintegrates into a very weird and ill-judged mess. It looks as if it might be a saucy romp, but is in fact doomily serious, like a stilted, stricken stage play. Sexual violence, PTSD and misogyny are among the issues that the film fails to address convincingly.

Writer-director Richard Hawkins (who scripted Paul Greengrass’s The Theory of Flight) imagines that during the second world war the British government commissioned porn films to be shown to troops as a morale-boost.