Starring: Sally Hawkins, Shonagh Price, Helen Katamba, Lewis Macleod, Steve Coogan, Harry Lloyd, Lee Ingleby
Distributor: Transmission Films
Runtime: 108 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2022
Reviewer: Jan Epstein
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A quest for the burial place of King Richard III, where amateur historian Philippa Langley defies the academic establishment to ultimately find his grave under a Leicester car park.
It is sometimes said that truth can be stranger than fiction, and this seems to be the case with director Stephen Frears’ latest film The Lost King, which dramatises the recovery of the remains of King Richard III beneath a car park in Leicester, England in 2012.
With great charm and charisma, Sally Hawkins plays Phillipa Langley, a long-term sufferer of chronic fatigue syndrome who escapes her disability, a failed marriage, and an unrewarding job in marketing, after seeing a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III in her hometown of Edinburgh.
Obsessed by the play and driven to know more about the historical Richard III, Philippa buys eight books about the much-reviled Plantagenet king and becomes convinced that Richard III has been unfairly vilified from Tudor times onwards as both a child-murderer (the two princes in the tower) and a hunched-back usurper.
When Philippa is visited by the ‘ghost’ of Richard III, who pops up several times in her home and at work looking exactly like the young actor (Harry Lloyd) who plays Richard III onstage, Philippa resigns from her job without telling her concerned ex-husband John Langley (played by Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the script), and becomes a fervent member of the Edinburgh Richard III Society.
Philippa is obsessed with not just rediscovering the king’s burial site but restoring his tarnished reputation, and from this point onwards, The Lost King plays with the truth, on and off screen, in tantalising ways.
Since the death of Richard III on Boswell Field in 1485, much has been written about the search for his burial site, with many of Richard III’s supporters as convinced as Philippa is that the maligned king’s remains were not thrown into the River Soar as some had suggested, but were buried in Leicester’s Greyfriars Franciscan Priory.
The priory was demolished during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, after which it was turned into a garden by Robert Herrick, who was Leicester’s mayor of the day.
Over centuries, the use of the site resulted in conflicting views as to where Richard was buried. Yet despite this and the views of some archaeologists from the University of Leicester, who are portrayed as being deeply scornful of Philippa’s scholarship and her right to historic ‘ownership’ of Richard, The Lost King shows that it was Philippa’s entrepreneurialism and her passionate fidelity to the ‘ghost’ of Richard III which resulted in the triumphant discovery of his un-coffined and naked corpse in a car park, just a decade ago.
The Lost King is based on The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III which Philippa Langely wrote with Morris Jones in 2013. At the age of 81, Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette 1985, Dangerous Liaisons 1988, Philomena 2013) is still a masterly filmmaker, and his adaptation of Philippa’s semi-mystical encounter with the ‘lost king’ of England as well as her quirky, obsessive need for historical veracity, is pictorially and emotionally mesmerising for most of the time.
The acting of the large cast is well-chosen and convincing, Hawkins, Coogan, and Ingleby as the snarky university archaeologist Richard Taylor, especially. But where the film founders and becomes side tracked, making it difficult to concentrate at times, is the desire of the filmmakers to play to all sides of the still-ongoing argument as to whether Philippa as an amateur historian was responsible for recovering Richard’s remains, or the university scholars whose livelihoods and prestige depends on professional acknowledgement.
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