Prince of Jutland Review

Long before Shakespeare, Saxo Grammaticus told the story of a prince who feigns madness to avenge his father, and Gabriel Axel films it with a bareness that reads as poverty rather than rigour. The cast looks remarkable on paper. Gabriel Byrne plays the usurping brother Fenge with a sullen watchfulness, Helen Mirren gives Geruth a flicker of calculation the script refuses to develop, and Brian Cox turns up as the duke Aethelwine for four scenes of welcome grit.

Christian Bale, twenty years old and still reedy, plays Amled's false idiocy as sulking rather than strategy, so the central deception carries no tension whatever. The production looks underfunded in a way that flat daylight exposes: mud, plain timber halls, costumes that read as rental stock, a landscape shot with no feel for scale. Worst is the dialogue, a stiff pseudo archaic register the actors cannot speak without sounding faintly embarrassed by it.

What survives is the bleakness of the source, the sense that vengeance here is an obligation and not a passion, plus one decent late sequence in the burning hall where Axel finally lets the violence be ugly. Everything around that is inert, and a hundred and seven minutes still feels padded.