The King Review

The choice that defines it is the refusal of Shakespeare. David Michod and Joel Edgerton write their own plainspoken dialogue and stage the story as political thriller rather than verse drama, and the gain is real: the court scheming has a legible, modern paranoia, and Agincourt is staged as an exhausting scrum in churned mud where armoured men suffocate under each other rather than duel. Adam Arkapaw shoots it beautifully, all cold light and long silences.

The loss is that without the language there is less for the actors to hold. Timothee Chalamet is well cast as a boy performing kingship and is convincing in stillness, but the script gives him too little to say and asks his face to carry meaning it has not earned. Robert Pattinson's Dauphin is a genuinely strange comic performance that belongs in a different, livelier film. Edgerton's Falstaff is reworked into a sober military adviser, which is defensible and drains the character of everything that made him worth adapting. Handsome, serious, and curiously inert.