Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ on Hulu, a Slog of a Historical Drama Slightly Elevated by Mark Rylance

Now on Hulu, Waiting for the Barbarians arrived remarkably unhyped when it upon its release in August 2020 — a surprise, perhaps, considering it features Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson and Oscar winner Mark Rylance, and is an adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s celebrated novel. Its blase reception at the Venice Film Festival, along with Oscar-nominated director Ciro Guerra’s (Embrace of the Serpent) sexual harassment and assault accusations, likely affected its debut, rendering it prime pandemic-depression buried-on-your-app-menus release fodder. But maybe it’s a diamond — or at least a nifty looking rock — in the rough?

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: At an unnamed outpost in an unnamed Asian desert territory, an unnamed magistrate (Rylance) spends his time overseeing a peaceful encampment via tedious bureaucracy. You know, counting things that probably don’t really need to be counted and writing down the number, stuff like that. If there’s a conflict between two farmers involving a fence and a stolen pig, he will mediate, and that makes for a busy-busy day. His hobby is finding artifacts of the local peoples, dusting them off and studying them like an amateur archaeologist. He’s a lonely man who occasionally visits the local courtesan, and sure looks like he feels all sad and guilty about it. He really is a nice guy. I picture him in another life being a kind grandfather in slippers, puffing on a pipe and rocking a child on his lap.

One day, a fancy carriage arrives at the gates carrying Colonel Joll (Depp), who has a serious sociopathic Gestapo air about him. Joll expresses concern with the “barbarians” who live on the lands Britain needs to conquer for no reason other than because god says they’re clearly superior or whatever — it isn’t made clear, but it actually is pretty clear. The magistrate is a kind man with a live-and-let-live M.O. that Joll finds as repulsive as poop in your soup. Joll sallies forth with his men and returns with “barbarian” prisoners. They’re bleeding and filthy; one man has had his eyes cut out. Just following orders, Joll says, probably lying, or at least interpreting them through the lens of a cretinous shitheel human being. As soon as Joll vacates, the magistrate has the prisoners released.

When winter edges in, he sees a pathetic beggar on the street. It’s a girl (Gana Bayarsaikhan), unnamed of course, one of the former detainees. He takes her in. She’s been blinded by some unimaginable method, her ankles have been smashed, her back is grotesquely scarred. He massages her feet tenderly, feeds her some kind of colorless English sludge (porridge, I’d wager), washes her hair. He sure seems to be in love. She doesn’t really respond to his kindness. She’s traumatized. It’s just a different type of prison for her. She hums a song of sorrow. He agrees to trek across the desert to return her to her people, naively assuming it’ll be just peachy. And it sure seems inevitable that Joll will return one of these days to assert that this type of kindness will absolutely NOT be tolerated.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The arid setting and gratuitous underuse of Pattinson’s skills brings to mind Werner Herzog misfire Queen of the Desert.

Performance Worth Watching: Rylance has such a richly mannered method of performance that can turn a fairly stolid, ditheringly paced film like this into a worthwhile character study. But ultimately there isn’t enough in this screenplay to bring the magistrate more than two-thirds to life.

Memorable Dialogue: Col. Joll’s philosophy: “Pain is truth. All else is subject to doubt.”

Sex and Skin: The magistrate visits a concubine in a slinky robe, but if something happens (note: something probably happened), we don’t see it.

Our Take: Guerra sure emphasizes the leisurely pace of life on the fringiest fringe of the British Empire, and if it wasn’t for Rylance and his stately, compassionate presence, Waiting for the Barbarians would be a marvelously photographed snooze. I haven’t read the novel, so I shan’t engage in conjecture as to its intentions, but the film has a Guffman-esque philosophical component tangling with a lecture on the gross moral failures of the piece of the Venn diagram where colonialism and imperialism overlap. There’s much talk of the barbarians arriving even though they never really arrive, and if they don’t arrive, well, British authority will damn well make them arrive by needlessly torturing their citizens. And to think, these lunatic nomadic non-white hordes had learned to live with this little Caucasian fort in the desert and generally avoided bloodshed. What a ridiculous way to live!

For certain, there are ideas at play here, ideas about xenophobia and racism that the film pounds to dust with a sledgehammer and illustrates with miserably gory displays of torture. It’s glazed with a little bit of borderline-silly Deppistentialism, the serial stunt actor playing a cartoonishly stoic villain emanating a few molecules of malice and even less inspiration. Pattinson shows up late in the movie playing an asshat British officer, a role demanding almost nothing from him. The third act offers a bit of tension, manifest in the sinking feeling that we’re about to witness displays of abject cruelty. Thankfully, some of it is left to the imagination, which is about as subtle as the movie gets.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Rylance gifts Waiting for the Barbarians with an undeniably earnest performance, but it’s not quite enough to lift it above derivative mediocrity.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Waiting for the Barbarians on Hulu