The Physician (2013)

The Physician arrives with the sturdy gait of a European television epic that wandered into cinemas by accident, which is roughly what happened. An orphan in eleventh-century England watches his mother die of side sickness, apprentices himself to a travelling barber surgeon, and eventually walks to Persia to study under Ibn Sina. The film wants adventure, and it gets adventure. Illness, sandstorms, a self-administered circumcision, a plague delivered by siege, a secret autopsy. The camera lingers on the scenery with the patience of a tourism brochure while the plotting moves at a gallop.

The cultural furniture here is historical, not ideological. Jewish doctors, Muslim scholars, Zoroastrian corpses, mullahs who burn libraries: all of it is load-bearing for a story about medicine crossing borders. The film takes religious persecution seriously because the eleventh century took it seriously, and it never stops to congratulate itself for the inclusion. Rebecca, the female lead, exists to be read to, impregnated, and sentenced to stoning for adultery, which is a fate rather than a platform. No character wrestles with identity in the modern sense. Robert's uncanny ability to feel terminal illness in strangers is treated as a gift, not a diagnosis, and nobody suggests the mining town needed a wellness initiative.

Where the film does lean forward, gently, is in its fondness for the collision between inquiry and doctrine. Ibn Sina against the mullahs, anatomy against scripture, the appendix against the imam. It is a pleasing theme, and the film trusts it to carry itself, which it mostly does. The result is agreeable, handsome, and ideologically inert, a saga that would sooner show us a trepanation than tell us how to feel about one.