Heysel 85 (2026)
There is a very good film somewhere inside Heysel 85, and for long stretches you can see it in the craft alone. Yet for all its technical brilliance, Teodora Ana Mihai's dramatisation of one of football's darkest nights left me strangely unmoved, and that is a difficult thing to admit about a film built on the deaths of thirty-nine people. It is admirable, intelligent and beautifully made, and it is also oddly cold. Three stars, and my reservations are as much about what it chooses to look at as how well it looks at it.
Let me start with the praise, because it is considerable. Shot on 16mm by Marius Panduru, the film looks as though it could genuinely have been made in 1985. The grain, the colour and the texture of it are all pitch perfect, and the decision to weave real archive footage into the drama is inspired. The join is almost invisible, and there is a queasy power in watching the reconstruction dissolve into the actual images from that night. On a pure craft level this is a seriously accomplished piece of work.
You would be forgiven for expecting, going in, a film about football. It is not. In fact the football itself plays no part at all. Heysel 85 is instead a study of bureaucracy and failure, of the authorities who could not, or would not, stop the violence that erupted before kick-off. It lays out the chain of institutional negligence with real clarity: the tickets sold on the black market, the collapse of any meaningful segregation, the fans packed far closer than they ever should have been, and the slow, chaotic official response as everything came apart. As an account of how a disaster is allowed to happen, it is sober and often damning, and it does not shy away from the consequences that followed, the reforms, the reckoning, and the five-year ban on English clubs in Europe.
The trouble is the vantage point. Mihai tells the story almost entirely from behind the scenes, through Marie (Violet Braeckman), the daughter and press secretary of the Brussels mayor, and Luca (Matteo Simoni), an Italian journalist. We watch the failure unfold from the corridors of power rather than the terraces, and while that is plainly a deliberate choice, it holds the horror at arm's length. I kept waiting for the film to put me in the crush, to show me the people caught up in it, to make me feel the human cost of what was happening only a few yards away. Instead it stays dry and procedural, a political drama that observes the tragedy without ever quite letting you grieve it. For a film about the loss of thirty-nine lives, that emotional distance is a real problem.
And then there is a mistake that, for me, is genuinely hard to forgive. Within the first ten minutes, a character representing Liverpool's backroom staff refers to them as the "poor red devils". The Red Devils, of course, are Manchester United, Liverpool's fiercest rivals. It is the kind of error that would make any football supporter wince, and in a film about a football tragedy it is close to unforgivable, especially when the sport itself is kept so pointedly off screen. If you are going to strip the game out of the story, the very least you owe it is to get the small details right.
Three stars, then, for a film I respect more than I warmed to. Heysel 85 is a handsome, thoughtful and technically superb piece of work with something serious to say about institutional failure, and it deserves credit for refusing the obvious, exploitative version of this story. But in holding the tragedy at such a careful distance, and in fumbling the very details it should have guarded most closely, it never quite earns the full weight of its subject. The thirty-nine who died deserved to be felt, and here, oddly, they remain just out of reach.
Reviewed from a screener provided by the distributor. Heysel 85 is in cinemas from 20 November.
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