The Promise Review

The Armenian genocide has had almost no serious treatment in English language cinema, which makes the decision to route this one through a romantic triangle harder to forgive rather than easier. Terry George shoots the deportation sequences with real gravity, and there are images here, a column of people walking into the desert, a river crossing, that carry the weight the film is reaching for. Everything between them is soap. Oscar Isaac and Bale are both capable of far more than this asks, and they spend the middle hour competing over Charlotte Le Bon in scenes that stop the history dead each time they arrive.

Le Bon is given nothing but to be desired and to react. The script explains its own context in speeches, so characters keep telling each other facts they would already know, and the score arrives early to tell you which deaths are tragic. The final act at Musa Dagh finds some of the scale it needed. By then the film has spent two hours proving that it did not trust the subject to hold an audience on its own.