Pilgrimage

PILGRIMAGE (2017)

This is the new film from the Irish director of the excellent 2009 flick called SAVAGE about an assault on a news reporter in Dublin (and it's aftermath) and I gotta say, if Werner Herzog had made this film rather than one about an Amazonian trek he wudda been quite happy.

The film is set in the early 1200s in Ireland where superstition and the struggle for Christian domination of the country are rife and there, an envoy from Rome is sent to collect a supposedly sacred relic from some rural monks and bring it back to the holy city.

The movie is grim, and conveys the horrible conditions people existed/lived in back then perfectly (the bloody weather looks the same as Ireland has now though haha). It's highly atmospheric, with bleak Irish landscapes, and the acting is top notch with the film basically being a dangerous road trip carrying the relic to a ship that's waiting for them in Waterford (to sail across to France and onward to Rome).

The fact that the film is recorded in Irish, French, and English adds a brilliant realism to proceedings which echoes the situation at the time with Ireland being infringed upon from all sides, and along the way things get very messy and bloody (one death is particularly gruesome).

I'm sure there wasn't a huge Hollywood budget for PILGRIMAGE but they've kept things really concentrated and its certainly exceeds what you might expect to be straight to video cheese.

This is the third film I've seen by Brendan Muldowney and I think the guy has some talent. I will be looking out for his next film and if you haven't already caught SAVAGE Id check that out too.

Yes this film is bloody. For some the scenes might even be shocking, but I really enjoyed this film. Acting was good, the suspense build up was very good. And at no point did it seem the violence was unnecessary. If you enjoy historical type films and don't mind seeing a head bashed in close up, you will enjoy this.

This is very good. far more realistic than Hollywood might produce. it's interesting, much dogma was born of superstition, identifications that without science, were attributed to whatever godly (natural) forces our people believed in at the time. However, belief is a force unto itself and it does serve to manipulate circumstance. that is in here too. well told

Well cast and acted. Visually pleasing and plenty of well performed action. If this is your genre you'll enjoy it

As far as period pieces set in the middle ages go, this one isn't very glamorous. It's a decently well made film with some strong individual performances that basically carry a mostly disjointed and only slightly nuanced story. My rating for this movie is a fairly weak 7/10. That rating is floated higher than I would have normally given it for three specific reasons.

First, the performances: Holland as the young, pious monk who has never known anything but life in the monastery yet quickly matures when faced with adversity. Bernthal as the obedient and entirely subservient mute with an obviously profound yet mysterious history who becomes the star of the show on more than one occasion without saying a word. Stanley Weber as the Cistercian, the guy the Church sends out to do their dirty work basically and effectively starts the "Pilgrimage" in the first place. Of course, there's also Richard Armitage as the surly French knight commanding his Baron father's equally surly men while throwing surly looks around all the time. This would have been a horribly dull and hard to watch movie if these guys didn't pull off these fairly typical medieval character archetypes well and it feels to me like they did.

Second, the action and set sequences were well done. I tend to be the kind of person who is immediately thrown off by a bad transition or a sequence of shots that just don't really work well together. I didn't see very much of that in this film. Granted, it's not difficult managing scene transition when most every scene is shot outdoors in Ireland but when the action happens, it's brutal and effective.

Third, symbolism. If you are someone who does not like it when a movie expects you to draw your own significance from the story it's trying to tell, this is not a movie you might like. Religion is a central theme in this movie and it is built on a foundation of symbolism that can be taken any number of different ways. If you like diving into the deeper meaning of things, you will actually love this movie. Especially how it ends.