The new thriller Overlord may be set during D-Day, but its roots go back to the 1950s and 60s. Director Julius Avery slips an aesthetic tipoff into the opening credits, styling the font to emulate the mid-century B-movies that filled out drive-in double features. In intention and execution, Overlord has more in common with retro throwbacks like Dead Snow or Iron Sky, paying homage to the mad fusion of history and conjecture that gave us They Saved Hitler’s Brain! decades earlier.

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Though Overlord and its ilk make deliberate overtures to their predecessors, these films also belong to a bygone era in a more unwitting sense. The nexus of the war and horror genres, once the province of exploitation films like Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS, has been overrun by allegory. In 2018’s film culture, where the internet’s opinion factory appends a coded subtextual reading to horror cinema with the investigative diligence of Encyclopedia Brown, an undaunted Avery has dared to make an apolitical movie about Nazis. If not for the Hugo Boss-designed uniforms, they’d be indistinguishable from any other faceless empire.

Avery’s back-to-basics approach flies in the face of recent trends, which favor the wartime setting as a conduit for more pointed commentary about conflict and the societies that engender it. Major wars take on a character all their own in these films, assigned an identity and meaning to correspond with a plot mounted on a smaller scale. The stately southern mansion of The Beguiled turns into a private hell for the Union soldier (Clint Eastwood, then Colin Farrell in Sofia Coppola’s adaptation) who takes refuge there as he falls victim to the fury of the women that call it home. By the time they’ve turned on him and busted out the bone saw, the civil war has come to symbolize an impotent, futile struggle fueled by pathetic masculinity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Under the Shadow. Photograph: PR/Sundance

The elastic significance of a war can be channeled into any horror premise under the sun. Ravenous slipped a couple decades back in time to equate the savagery of cannibalism with the brutality of the Mexican-American war. Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow stuck its protagonist in the middle of Tehran’s turbulent post-revolutionary period, reactionary authoritarianism plaguing her as a literal specter. The megaflop Below repurposed a second world war-era submarine as a pressure cooker for the treacherous navy officers trapped inside it, a ready analog for the dehumanization that sticks to soldiers long after they end their tours of duty.

Just as frequently, however, modern war-horror mashups will foreground their critiques instead of leaving the viewers to read between the lines. Guillermo del Toro has made no bones about his stance on the Spanish civil war, ruthlessly denouncing the fascists in two separate films. Both the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth and his earlier film The Devil’s Backbone are strewn with markers of Franco’s regime among the flights of phantasmagorical fancy. Ofelia, the willful young girl venturing into el laberinto, gains a nemesis in her icy-veined military stepfather. He splits the difference between a fairytale villain and a revolutionary propaganda sketch, placing Franco’s troops in line with primal, ancient evils.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivana Baquero and Doug Jones in Pan’s Labyrinth. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Overlord doesn’t have much to say about the Nazis, other than that they were decidedly bad folks, tinkering with the laws of nature and science behind the scenes of combat. Avery works the what-if angle endemic to speculative fiction, the tack in vogue when comic books and sci-fi flicks imagined Reich experiments. The exploitation boom of the 70s moved Nazi fiction into more lurid territory, gratuitous gore and supple flesh the order of the day. Titles like SS Hell Camp left loftier motives in the backseat to pursue low-rent sensationalism and tarnished pleasures, too busy getting everyone’s clothes off to interrogate the dark legacy of Hitler’s run at world domination.

Overlord stops short of these extremes, though it has its fair share of grisly fun once the curtain’s been drawn back on the Nazis’ sinister plans. Even so, after all the bones have been snapped and the squib packs have been detonated, an insubstantial air hovers around this account of an ordinary mission gone fubar. Surface-level tribute to the thinner genre forefathers works all right in the case of oddball indies gunning for cult glory, but Avery was working on a different scale. With so much at his disposal in terms of talent and resources, he can’t avoid comparison to his more thoughtful, polished contemporaries, and his film doesn’t quite stack up favorably. Overlord has no discernible interest in making a statement, and at present, that feels less like a creative choice and more like an omission.