‘The Lost King’ Review – A Shallow, Misleading Exploration Of A Fascinating Historical Story [Athena Film Festival 2023]

Richard III is, well, not exactly the most respected English king. He’s most well known for child murder, usurping the throne, and being a tyrant in power. He stars as the namesake villain of a Shakespeare play, declaring, “now is the winter of our discontent,” and begs to exchange his “kingdom for a horse” when he’s offed in the Battle of Bosworth Field at the end.

In 2012, he was found buried in—of all places—a parking lot in Leicester, England, paved over where a medieval friary once stood. The highly publicized quest to find the royal’s body was spearheaded by amateur researcher and historian Philippa Langley and was chronicled in numerous books, documentaries, articles, videos around the world.

Now, Langley has become the protagonist of a fictional film. Stephen Frears’s latest film, The Lost King, is pitched as a “life-affirming true story” that “took on the country’s most eminent historians.” None of this is strictly true. If you’re an enjoyer of one-dimensional affirmation narratives starring a girlboss protagonist and mildly funny jokes, the film will likely be an entertaining watch. Otherwise, The Lost King is a shallow exploration of what should be an interesting topic that ultimately undercuts the very empowerment it claims to champion.

(Fictional) Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) is a Richard III fan. Well, that would be an understatement. In truth, it’s closer to a parasocial relationship. After seeing a conventionally attractive actor play the king, Philippa develops an interest—or obsession rather—in the actual historical figure. She begins seeing visions of him. She’s convinced that the bad press surrounding him was really fake news spread by the Tudors to legitimize their rule. She talks to him as if he were her boyfriend (“I’m doing this for you,” she tells him at one point in the film) and is guided by him to his final burial spot in the parking lot. The rest of the film follows her fight against asshole men and misogynist institutions to prove her theory and disinter Richard III’s body.

The Lost King tries to tell (real) Langley’s true story, as told in her book The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III, in a comical, fantastical manner. The film wants to be many things: sharply funny, personally touching, affirming and validating, and a feminist declaration. It succeeds at none of them. The result is a nearly two hour long runtime of flat characters and underdeveloped ideas that fails to achieve any sort of depth beyond surface level references.

Part of the reason is the movie’s reliance on exaggerated humor. Note: not satire. After all, there is little commentary of note in the one-off jokes and caricatured characters throughout the film. As Philippa fights to prove her theory that Richard III’s body is buried in the parking lot, her main antagonists are a series of exceedingly slappable men who exist solely as obstacles for Philippa to overcome. Every interaction is laced with a sitcom energy that contradicts the serious themes it tries to tackle. As a result, nothing in the film is grounded and any commentary it tries to make falls apart.

Which is problematic—given that the film positions itself as a capital-I-Important film. This is only a symptom of the movie’s hollow ethos, emptier than the “hollow crown” that Shakespeare famously wrote about. The Lost King’s alleged commitment to female empowerment is, in reality, the worst of what’s now popularly referred to as “girlboss feminism”: A hyper-individualistic ideology centered solely on individual affirmations of (usually white and privileged) women. It argues that just as long as one woman does well for herself, feminist equality has been achieved for all.

The Lost King fixates on the most surface level symptoms of structural issues: offhand references to how women (really, white middle-class women) are viewed as overemotional, expected to cook and clean and take care of kids, and how they feel stuck with no meaning in life.

Instead, Philippa becomes the exemplar of the girlboss, the solitary woman achieving her ambitions by herself without the community, influence, or support of others. (The deeper problematic implications of this are mentioned later in the review). All that’s necessary is her personal success, her personal validation; she is affirmed by the end of the narrative and that is enough for “empowerment.” Despite having rich, real life narratives to draw from, The Lost King fails to cut below the surface of these simplistic narratives.

One example of this is the film’s controversial depiction of academia. The University of Leicester is depicted as a place full of arrogant snobs that conspire to steal the work of the heroine and discredit her at every turn. There’s truth to that. Academia is a legitimately problematic institution full of issues that directly harm women, including the rampant abuse of power, sexual misconduct, and an exploitative business structure. Unsurprisingly, many powerful men do say slappable things, but The Lost King completely misses the opportunity to analyze any specificities or draw a complex picture of these dynamics. Instead, the university is reduced to a cartoon villain whose men exist solely to serve as an obstacle and foil to Philippa herself.

Despite what Alexandre Desplat’s dramatic score might suggest, The Lost King is hardly an epic quest. There are no stakes in the movie— on multiple levels. The plot contains no tension; Philippa faces challenges in one scene that are resolved in the next. (Being validated for following your “feelings,” after all, is easy when you can just quit your job without meaningful consequences and stir thousands of people to donate significant amounts of cash overnight.) Characters are underdeveloped or dropped entirely: coworkers disappear, a rocky relationship with a husband is miraculously solved, and the hallucination of Richard III that she sees and talks to but no one else does, simply exists without comment. (As a result, Philippa’s character becomes too uncomfortably close to an unsubverted, mad-domestic-housewife-given-valium stereotype).

And crucially, the film never convincingly explains why the audience should be invested in Richard III’s reputation—especially in an age where the bloody legacy of Britain’s royal family is actively being questioned. It would be one thing if The Lost King were a character portrait of woman exploring her passion, but the film’s stubbornly determined to be more than that. The Richard III society that Philippa joins claims they fight misinformation and fake news online—a poor analogy, considering the very real consequences of fake news and immaterial impacts of a royal’s reputation.

More problematically, Frears has repeatedly positioned the movie as a feminist disruption of history. Richard III’s unfairly tarnished reputation, the narrative suggests, parallels Langley’s own life. She’s also disabled (with the devastating disease myalgic encephalitis), unfulfilled, misunderstood, and discredited by the men around her. The central thesis is: just as Richard III was erased in history, the contributions of women like Langley are ignored as well.

Langley’s hardly an obscure subject. She’s published her own book. She’s starred in documentaries made of her search. She’s been awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Queen herself. To be clear: this is not a slight on real-life Langley whose story and achievements deserve a much better film than this. Rather, it’s more indicative of misplaced priorities of the notably male writers and directors on the team and their shallow understanding of feminism and empowerment.

In reality, The Lost King itself is far from the true historical narrative it portrays itself to be. As many have pointed out, the film actually participated in the erasure of numerous women involved on the project. The car park theory was first proposed by Audrey Strange in 1962; Annette Carson came to the same conclusion in the book Richard III: The Maligned King in 2008. And though Langley became convinced of the car park theory by 2005, she was spurred to spearhead the excavation by a (gasp!) male historian’s work shortly afterwards. None of these points mean that Langley’s road was smooth or that she faced no (misogynist) pushback in male dominated spaces, but centering the entire narrative solely around Philippa— and implying that Philippa entirely came to those conclusions herself— ignores those crucial contributions.

This issue is magnified in the film’s depiction of the University of Leicester’s archaeological team. The misrepresentation of real, living people under the guise of fiction is ethically questionable and has already been criticized. The Lost King leaves out multiple women who were crucial to the project’s success. Osteroarchaeologist Jo Appleby does briefly makes it in—though as an annoyed university employee doubtful of Langley—but numerous others are MIA.

Other researchers like Turi King, who worked for months confirming genetically that the skeleton was indeed Richard III’s, are entirely absent. Those women have since expressed their disappointment at the film’s portrayal of them. As King told the BBC: “I used to be so proud of this massive, wonderful project that was an amazing partnership between so many people, all bringing their expertise to the table. That was the joy of it. So to see it being portrayed like this, particularly in how they portray certain members of the team in such a misleading way, was just so sad really.”

This context entirely undermines the core theme of The Lost King. Which is a shame because the central concept—how women are often viewed as amateurs and denied credit for their work—is an important and interesting one. Maybe that’s the one way this movie truly parallels Richard III himself. Ultimately, The Lost King is as consequential as defending a medieval king’s reputation in the modern age: which is to say, it hardly matters at all.

The Lost King was viewed at the Athena Film Festival. The film will be released exclusively in theaters beginning March 24, 2023 courtesy of IFC Films. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXxRfhQFuV4]