It’s tempting to think of the chaotic world in which we live, and of the people who inhabit it, both current and historic, in starkly binary terms – good and evil, black and white, laudable and not.
It helps us make sense of a messy world and it reassures us that, whatever the evidence on the ground, people and things can be easily understood, categorised and dealt with.
But as John Langley (Steve Coogan), the ex-husband of Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) the campaigner who helped unearth the lost grave of King Richard III in a Leicester carpark in 2012 and whose story is depicted with empathy and heart in The Lost King, says to her one intimately salient exchange, people particularly don’t always fall into neat boxes, their lives a mess of contradictions and good and bad impulses, a subtlety and truth of human experience that often isn’t reflected in the historical record.
His comments are timely because Philippa, who pursues her quest with singleminded fervour borne of a need for a purpose to drive her life and a prevailing hatred of injustice against those who can’t defend themselves, has been swept up in the idea that Richard III has been grievously wronged and that he is not the dramatically-rich villain reflected by Shakespeare and much of the historical record.
In the standard telling of events, Richard III, the last Plantagenet ruler who died in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, is a villain of the highest order, a hunchback monster that frightened dogs, murdered his nephews and who was a usurper who does not deserve to be called a King of England.
After seeing a staging of the play with her son, the ME-sufferer who laments how often her medical diagnosis becomes the totality of what people see of her and who has an admitted soft spot for underdogs and the misunderstood, begins to investigate whether Richard III is as demonically evil as the Tudors made him out to be.
After buying eight books on Richard III at a second-hand bookshop, evidence that Philippa is an all-in or not-at-all kind of person, a trait on expansive evidence in The Lost King, she joins the Richard III society, an organisation dedicated to the belief that the reviled usurper is the victim of disparaging Tudor PR that does not reflect who he actually was.
Philippa subscribes to this idea wholeheartedly, the extent of her unquestioning commitment to the Ricardian cause given visible form as she sees and talks to an ermine-robed Richard III (Harry Lloyd) who waits outside her home, meets her on the street and whom she talks as if he is actually there.
All anyone including her sons (who are a delight with the youngest Raife, played by Benjamin Scanlan, lamenting at one point and with unintended humour that she should feed her children before looking for a lost king) see is their obsessed mum talking to thin air but for Philippa he is real, a lost, maligned soul looking for kind of rest that only she can bring him.
In many ways Philippa’s quest, the exact nature and extent of which has been the source of controversy with Leicester University and the archaeologists who follow her research to find Richard III’s body under an ugly carpark which used to be a church centuries earlier, is the centre of the film’s quietly beating storytelling heart.
But just as important to The Lost King is why Philippa undertakes this quest on in the first place, a quest that, by the way, has been taken on by many people previously, all of whom gave up before finding him.
So, why does Philippa persist when so many others sensibly, as one member of the Richard III society humourously observes, go back to their lives and leave the historical sleuthing to someone else?
In many ways, contends The Lost King, this is really all Philippa has to define herself.
While she’s an ex-wife on good terms with her husband and a mother to two lovely sons, she is in a sales job she hates, battling a disease that undercuts any attempts she makes to carpe diem life, and she feels she’s simply a person looking for something, a something which is never defined and always just out of reach.
While the search for Richard III’s body and its discovery, and the constant discussion about who he was and whether he is a monster of history or a wrongly reviled villain who was actually a visionary reformer, are fascinating in huge measure, the real heart of The Lost King lies in how this search affects and comes to define Philippa and also how it’s all too tempting to see people in starkly good or bad terms when so much of life is rendered somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.
What we see more than not is a raw humanity as Hawkins, who has a gift for portraying vulnerable people on the margins in search of meaning and purpose in their life, delivers a virtuosic performance that uncovers what lies behind the fact-finding and deductive reasoning, and more than a bit of feeling and intuition.
She is a gifted determined person who manages to do what no one else did, and whether you believe Leicester University or Langley’s account of events which mirror in some way the back-and-forth discussion over Richard III and his true nature and actions, Langley is a beguiling protagonist to have that at the centre of this moving and enthralling detective chase for both Richard III’s reputation and body but for the heart of who Langley herself is.
The Lost King may appear to be a quirky tilt at the finding Richard III windmill, and in many ways it is sweetly engaging on that level, but it is also a deep dive into what makes people tick, why we need to believe in extremes to get through the day and that while that sort of clearly etched belief does get things done like finding king’s bodies lost for 500 years, the truth and sense of purpose we all need can lie somewhere in-between and that making our peace with that is a whole other journey all its own.