Jonathan Dore

A deeply cynical and morally empty film that leaves you feeling like you need to take a shower afterwards, so toxic is the taste it leaves in the mouth (apologies for the mixed metaphor). I'm not sure if the director intended us to enjoy or be amused by the ambivalence of having one criminal character find herself being threatened by another, but if so, it failed. There is no ambivalence. You *want* the Russian mafia boss and his goons to get his mum out of the care-home prison and blow Marla and Fran away, and are disappointed when they don't succeed. That's right -- you actually want a violent, probably sadistic drug boss to impose some moral order on the situation, so empty is it of any of the normal forces that usually help glue society together -- police, lawyers, courts, medical staff, all of whose representatives here are either corruptly complicit or blissfully unaware of what's going on.

Rosamund Pike continues and extends the revolting character she perfected in Gone Girl (and is the only reason to give this film any stars at all), though her character Marla does at least have one vulnerability here: her love for Fran. But if the script/direction intended for us to see their tender moments as humanizing or redeeming, they did not succeed. You still want both of them to die unpleasant deaths.

For me, this film was a success because it captured that horrified sense of loss not only of a battle, or of lives, but of a whole culture and the 650-year history that had produced it. The decision to focus only on the ordinary foot-soldiers (to the extent that none of the three leaders had a single line to speak, and William did not even appear on screen) was a good one, since it allowed the story to represent the fate of peoples instead of just the fate of kings. The narration, in a good imitation of the style of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, was mournful and measured, and the revelation of the narrator's identity at the end nicely rounded out one thread of the story. Despite the constant bloodletting, the characters were attractive: Leofric the happy-go-lucky coward who does the right thing in the end; Hrothgar the weary general always trying to rally his weary men for one more fight; and Snorri the captured Viking who becomes a mainstay of the English at Hastings. The final stages at Hastings reminded me of the poem commemorating another English defeat, 75 years before:

"Thought shall be harder, heart shall be keener / Spirit shall be greater, as our might lessens." (The Battle of Maldon, 991)