Synopsis
At an isolated frontier outpost, a colonial magistrate suffers a crisis of conscience when an army colonel arrives looking to interrogate the locals about an impending uprising, using cruel tactics that horrify the magistrate.
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Cast
- Mark RylanceThe Magistrate
- Johnny DeppColonel Joll
- Robert PattinsonOfficer Mandel
- Gana BayarsaikhanThe Girl
- Greta ScacchiMai
- David DencikThe Clerk
- Sam ReidThe Lieutenant
- Harry MellingGarrison Soldier #4
- Bill MilnerGarrison Soldier #5
- Gursed DalkhsurenOld Prisoner
Recommendations
- 83
The Playlist
The metaphors are a bit too numerous and on the nose at times, but Rylance’s unbelievable performance overshadows the minor downfalls. - 67
The Film Stage
Despite the on-the-nose delivery of its messaging being intentional, Coetzee’s script will surely alienate some viewers. The slow pacing won’t do it any favors either, considering it promises weightier drama than that heightened, moralizing tone could ever provide. - 63
Slant Magazine
Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere. - 63
Movie Nation
Depp could be dismissed as just a name and a costume who got the film financed, but his Franco-Teutonic take on Joll never quite crosses into caricature. It’s good to see him putting in the effort. Pattinson? His tiny part basically is just a name and a costume who got the film financed. - 60
The Guardian
It’s easy to read the film as a not particularly subtle metaphor for fascism or “the war on terror”, and its black hats aren’t so much characters as automatons. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
The critique of those in power and their need to put down others — preferably foreign or different-looking people — in order to stay on top is as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. But like its noncommittal production design, which combines various North African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences for the locals and locales, the critique itself remains finally quite dull and dispersed because it's so broad and unspecific. - 60
Variety
Coetzee’s novel, with its measured, interiorized voice and sparse, incrementally devastating narrative, was never an obvious fit for film treatment. After a stiffly mannered, overwritten first act, however, Waiting for the Barbarians gradually gains in poetry and power, while Mark Rylance’s lead performance, as a liberal-minded colonial official undermined and overwhelmed by his tyrannical superiors, gives proceedings a quiet but firm moral core. - 50
IndieWire
It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.
