The Lost King Review

When the remains of former King and living person Richard III were dug up in a parking lot, heaved out of the ground and subsequently thrown back into the mud, it caused a bit of a strange stir. Still, The Lost King is more focused on the fundamentals of trying to find the remains of Richard III, played by Harry Lloyd in a series of flashbacks, than it is on the aftermath of burying a royal. Steve Coogan stars in and pens this piece, basing his writings on that of Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) and a number of flashes of historical pasts. Fundamentally light, yet Hawkins has pushed through with another striking lead performance. There is no need for that top form in what is, essentially, a light jaunt through a forgotten modern oddity.

Sibling camaraderie pushes through, and the everyday throes of family life and the stresses of it are made very clear. The Lost King feels fine enough. Stephen Frears is a firm hand behind the camera, so often failing to amount to anything more than a solid man to point and angle the story in the right moments at the right time. It is important, of course, but it does not feel like it adds anything beyond the fundamentals. The Lost King is proof of that. A very sickly feature that sees Frears under the arms of the royals once more, making William Shakespeare feel boring and the British comedy genre feel as fusty and dull as ever.

Hawkins’ performance is good but the solemnity of the script and the hammered home, obvious moments do not just do little for this piece but they scream of Coogan lines and gags. Parts of this feel made for TV. That sheen over the top of the story, the supporting characters, the bleak and obvious narrative threads from job satisfaction to seeing things. For no good reason, this happens, and it is a fundamentally flawed history lesson yet also a pretty underwhelming comedic piece that plays with fantasy and legend. All that is on the table, nothing is done with it. Still, not every UK-based comedy can be a winner, even though the weighing of the good and bad is heavily favouring quality, instead of the banal oddity that is The Lost King.

Maybe that is harsh, though, on just how dull and uncouth The Lost King can be. A family struggling to hold together and make ends meet, yet buying up eight books to pursue a suddenly imposed fascination with Richard III, despite clearly being bored by the play, is sprung on as a perplexing narrative thread. Experts in archaeology have claimed this is an inaccurate portrayal of how Richard III’s remains were found, excavated, cleaned and dumped. Of course it is inaccurate. It is hard to see Langley having a back-and-forth conversation with a dead entity that lives rent-free in her mind. But “based on a true story” does a lot of heavy lifting, and the stranger parts of this piece, from the Richard III society to the dramatization of what was very mundane and still is, marks The Lost King as based on a bed of banality.