After the death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV plunges all of Europe into a chaos as the elite all vie for the newly vacant seat of power.  With no Emperor and two popes residing, King Sigismund of Hungary (Matthew Goode) and Henry of Rosenberg (Til Schweiger) make their bloody bid for power.  Lord Boreš (Michael Caine), however, wants to see The Bohemian King Wenceslaus IV (Karel Roden) appointed, but he is seen as too weak-willed to rule by some of the more powerful and influential leaders of the land.  After an assassination attempt on Boreš is thwarted by Jan Žižka (Ben Foster), the mercenary eventually agrees to a plan that goes against his and his party’s code that involves the kidnapping of Lady Catherine (Sophie Lowe), the fiancé of Rosenberg, in an attempt to force the installation of Wenceslaus IV as emperor. 

Petr Jákl writes and directs Medieval for The Avenue Entertainment, the US arm of Highland Film Group launched in 2020.  The bloody epic is a massive affair with a wide array of battle locations, tactics, and armies of soldiers awaiting their death.  At only 126 minutes, the film has a lot of ground to cover, and one can argue too much, as the dense script struggles often to find its groove.  The twisted political plot is too convoluted for those without backing knowledge of 14^th century European alliances to really make any sense of, and those historians in the audience will probably find themselves frustrated at Lord Boreš, a central figure to the intrigue at hand, and a wholly fictional character.  

With the vacancy of the Holy Roman Seat sending Europe into a frenzy, so too are the studios in a battle of their own to fill the gap in the social zeitgeist after the ending of the wildly popular Game of Thrones (2011-19) series on HBO.  Allusions to the George R. R. Martin franchise will affect castle dramas long into the foreseeable future, even one rooted somewhat in history as is Medieval.  Jákl appears to be trying to cash in on some of that good will of the audience by including the utterance of the phrase “winter is coming” an innocuous phrase that will forevermore bring up images of dragons and direwolves.  Medieval, unlike Thrones, really struggles under the weight of the political plot, and while the alliances were always en flux in the fictional world of Westeros, Jákl moves far too quickly over the complicated setup of whose who, and with all of the similarly styled men clad in chainmail, the film becomes more impenetrable than Žižka’s phalanxes. 

For where the Medieval struggles narratively, as a piece of action and battle filmmaking, it does quite well. Some of the hand-to-hand sequences get a little overzealous as the camera swings through the splattered mud and blood, but when it does cut away to a wider shot, the action is all quite legible. These sequences are very well put together and play with scope and scale quite often. Medieval is not an epic with a cast of thousands, but like a good stage play, it feels much bigger than what we are actually seeing. There is enough craft on screen and behind the camera that our imaginations can fill in the gaps on the battlefields. When the camera gets close, however, be prepared for some brutal and primitive shots, such as when Žižka’s nephew (William Lizr) is impaled or when Žižka himself loose his eye in battle. For all the bloodshed and violence, Medieval never feels quite like an onslaught – gratuitous, for sure, even employing a ravenous lion – but Jákl is still interested in telling a story, even if his delivery of the plot still leaves much to be desired. 

At its core, even more so than the political maneuvering, is Lowe’s Lady Catherine, the bargaining chip that will grant whichever army she is with the upper hand. For the larger part of the film, she is in a rather thankless role as a hostage being moved to and fro, keeping her head down to help preserve her own life. As the film winds on, she begins to see Žižka not just as a captor, but as carrying out a noble mission and slowly but surely cracks begin to form in her fidelity towards Rosenburg. Because she is so rigidly written, the change of heart, at least from a romantic angle is a tough pill to swallow hindered further by an air of oafishness which Foster plays Žižka in these moments of growth, but from a moral standpoint Catherine’s rebuke of the senselessness of the violence and a wish for it to end feels true. Lowe is given more agency towards the later scenes of the film as the armies come to a head, though it is too little too late on behalf of the script to bring her role or the film back into good graces which is a shame as her character is the key to unlocking the deeper plot notes of the film. 

Medieval is unlike many films made today, historical epics with full of love, betrayal, and bloodshed. It does not seek to romanticize the muddy and dirty landscapes of 14^th century feudal Europe and even the castles of the nobility are dimly lit by whatever sunlight can slip through the narrow windows of the cold, stone parapets. This chilly nature, unfortunately, makes it only harder to balance the uneven script as the world of the film feels wholly unwelcoming and some added liberties in the production design could have helped open the receptiveness of audiences to what is on screen. While the production value puts it well above the stuffy public access reenactment documentaries shown in schoolrooms on the wheeled-in television/vcr set, the way the story is presented would make heavy even the eyelids of even the most studious in the room. With as many threads as Medieval is trying to spin, a little bit of voiceover would have gone a long way in helping to keep everything straight because far too much is lost in the brief scenes of intrigue and there are far too few of them to understand more granularly why certain parts of the story in the secondary characters arcs are taking place. The film has all the intention of being a massive and timeless epic but falls short by focusing a little too much on the battles and not as much on the human reasoning behind it all.