The First King (2019)

The First King arrives with mud on its boots and Latin on its tongue, an archaic reconstruction assembled by linguists at the University Guglielmo Marconi and fleshed out with Proto-Indo-European roots. Matteo Rovere's camera follows Romulus and Remus, shepherd brothers swept from their pasture by a flash flood and sold into servitude in Alba Longa. They escape, steal the sacred fire of Vesta, and drag a priestess named Satnei along as a hostage. A prophecy follows, then a fratricide, then the founding of Rome. The film has no interest in making any of this comfortable.

The drama trades in pietas against power. Remus rejects a divine order that demands he kill his brother, then degrades his own people into slaves; Romulus rekindles the flame and appoints the first Vestal. Rovere has stated plainly that he intended no commentary on contemporary politics, and the film honors that restraint. Women appear as priestesses and firekeepers, embedded in the myth's machinery instead of standing outside it to make an argument. There is no economic critique, no racial reckoning, no body politics, no diagnosis of the mind. The struggle is for kingship and the favor of gods who do not negotiate.

The result is a grim, physical, occasionally punishing piece of filmmaking, two hours of hunger and blood and cold water. Its only faint contemporary tremor is the observation, offered by the director in interviews, that myths speak through symbols we reinterpret in our own light. The film itself never lectures. It watches brothers destroy each other and calls the wreckage a city. The end credits animate the growth of Roman territory to the reign of Trajan, a quiet reminder that the empire outlived everyone who built it. There is nothing here for the cultural commissars to claim. A somber artifact, well made, and ideologically inert. This is a film about the eighth century BC that has the good manners to stay there.

{"thematic_tags": []}