"A history lesson, a ruined house, a grave and a memorial"

There are films that are a hard watch, and there's Steve McQueen's Grenfell. But then that's very much the point.

Describing it cannot do justice to its power - but I'll attempt it anyway. The artist's 24-minute-long piece opens with a camera flying serenely over the outskirts of London bathed in winter sun, the sounds of the world below soundtracking its movement. It then changes course and heads towards the city centre, the volume increasing to a deafening howl as it zeroes in on the burned-out shell of the tower block.

At that point, the sound abruptly disappears, replaced by total silence as the camera circles around and around the building, its dizzying and nauseating orbit conducting a forensic examination from all sides. We're taken close enough to see, through empty window frames, the red plastic sacks containing the charred remains of lives and homes. As the camera finally starts to move away, the noise of the city begins to bleed back in, until both sound and vision shut off entirely.

McQueen felt some urgency in making Grenfell, aware that contractors were beginning to wrap the building in hoarding: "I feared once the tower was covered up it would only be a matter of time before it faded from the public's memory." The film's purpose is confrontational: to make the reality of the tower and what happened unignorable.

The act of covering is itself deeply symbolic, of course. It was the building's literal cladding that contributed to the rapid spread of the fire, and in its wake there have been desperate attempts to metaphorically shroud the facts in what Paul Gilroy, in his accompanying essay Never Again Grenfell, damningly brands "mists of calculated misinformation", "PR propaganda" and "a mesh of duplicity". 

McQueen's film is a determined and profoundly affecting attempt to counteract all such efforts at covering over/up. We may not want to look, but look we must. Only by doing so can we do justice to those who died and ensure that such a horrific and avoidable loss of life is never repeated.