Medieval (2022)

Medieval arrives as the most expensive Czech film ever mounted, a mud-caked chronicle of Jan Žižka's undocumented youth, and it carries itself like a monument. Petr Jákl directs Ben Foster through a fifteenth-century Bohemia of dynastic squabbling, wagon forts, and a great deal of rain. Michael Caine appears as a fictional lord, largely so that the poster can say Michael Caine. The picture is competent, grim, and almost entirely innocent of the cultural signifiers we are obliged to catalogue.

That innocence is worth recording. The cast is uniformly white Europeans and Americans playing Bohemians, and the film never once turns to address the arrangement. There is no same-sex attachment, no ecological lament, no neurodivergent subplot, no body-image sermon. The peasantry does rise against its betters, and a dying lord manages a line about kings being unable to change the world for the better, but this is pre-modern class resentment, the sort that has decorated historical epics since the silent era. It is not a critique of markets.

The one figure granted any interiority is Katherine, who kills a captain and later throws herself from a wall to save the hero. She is permitted a knife and a noble death, which is more than the genre usually offers, though she remains a love interest first and a damsel second. The closing dedication to those who fight for freedom lands with a soft inspirational thump before the credits. The liberties taken with a life historians barely document are taken in the service of national myth, not ideological revision. Otherwise the film concerns itself with pikes, mud, and the manufacture of a hero. A sommelier would call it a sturdy table wine, poured in generous volume, with no political aftertaste whatsoever.