Outlaw King (2018)

Outlaw King arrives as a Netflix historical action drama, all mud, blood, beards, and the Scottish Wars of Independence. David Mackenzie stages the thing with grim competence. The film concerns kingship, rebellion, feudal loyalty, and the price of a crown. It is a 2018 production that behaves like a 1995 one, which is a compliment of a narrow and specific kind.

The cast is white, uniformly so, as a fourteenth-century Scottish epic would be, and the film makes no attempt to comment on the fact or correct it. No LGBTQ characters appear anywhere. The conflict is national and dynastic, Scots against English, and the film never reaches for a racial or identity framework to explain it. There is no environmental lament, no critique of wealth or capital, no meditation on bodies or minds that deviate from a norm. The script has other business on its mind: spears, ditches, and the correct way to conceal a spear wall.

Florence Pugh's Elizabeth de Burgh is granted more spine than the period usually allows, refusing to renounce her marriage and enduring a hanging cage for the refusal. This is sturdy historical characterization, not a thesis. Elsewhere the film takes its liberties, placing Edward II at Loudoun Hill and shaping Robert into a man of the people, but these are the ordinary embellishments of the genre, not an ideological rewrite. Historians note that yellow, the most common dye in medieval Scotland, is almost entirely absent from the costumes, which tells you where the film's priorities sit. The theme of freedom arrives through mud and slaughter, not speeches. The film shows. It rarely lectures. For that small mercy, and for the mud, it earns a measure of respect.