Pilgrimage
(2017 Tribeca Film Festival Review)
Photo: Tribeca Film Festival
Quest films are best when they understand that, like in the tales of King Arthur, the journeys they chronicle are often designed to destroy the questers through the very thing they seek. Glory, purity, power—there’s an ironic end to them all. In Brendan Muldowney’s Pilgrimage, when a band of Irish monks is recruited to escort an ancient holy relic across the post-Crusade island occupied by factions whose conquering lust has not yet been sated, we know this group was meant to be tested from the beginning.
The main party is made up of rookie Brother Diarmuid (Tom Holland), a mute (Jon Bernthal), foreigner Brother Gerladus (Stanley Weber) and veteran Brother Ciaran (John Lynch). They speak to each other in old Gaelic, English and sometimes French, building, because their words have been overwhelmed by their faith, their relationships through physicality. They’ve come together because the monastery at which the brothers and enigmatic mute (who washed ashore years ago, silent on a makeshift boat known for its carriage of repentant sinners) reside was formed to guard this relic.
Somewhere between the complicated piety of Martin Scorsese’s Silence and Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings film, Pilgrimage draws its religious doubt from a cultural and historical well, rather than from the suffering and torture sprung from the clash between the two forces as they vie for superiority. Christianity is dominant here (rather than a subversive, persecuted religion in Silence’s Japan) which alters the typical religious narrative of the personal protection of and struggle with faith, transforming into a broader action epic in a world that, from the characters’ perspectives, depends on them. Meanwhile, Pagan religions—polytheistic myths of nymphs and spirits—flood the screen with supernatural hints while cinematographer Tom Comerford shoots the film with such wide-eyed awe of nature that it’s easy to buy into a mystical world beneath the island’s gray-green moss. Contrasted with this natural aesthetic are devout monks dressed in their light hewn robes, passively resisting the primal calls of war and barbarism.
Early in their cross-country journey, their guard abandons them, leaving them to meet an occupying military unprotected. This army is led by Sir Raymond (Richard Armitage) and his father, both men with a vested militaristic and political interest in mystical relics. Their country and loyalties are left ambiguous, an unimportant detail lost in the powerful lure of God’s favor. Raymond develops from friend to possible enemy to hounding pursuer with a fiery hate burning in his sharp eyes, as he hulks over the locals in his chain mail, spitting condescension with every word.
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