‘William Tell’: Toronto Review

Dir: Nick Hamm. UK/Italy. 2024. 133mins 

William Tell is a tale forged in blood and dour expressions featuring a mournful performance by Claes Bang as the legendary Swiss huntsman. But the folk hero is so broadly drawn that the film’s celebration of a tortured, noble underdog squaring off with the ruthless Austrian armies seeking to sack his homeland falls somewhat flat. Despite the comforting pleasures of watching old-fashioned battle scenes waged with swords, axes and crossbows, Bafta-winning director Nick Hamm’s action film recycles the stirring spectacle of bygone epics without having much new to tell.

A histrionic tone that’s always treated with utter earnestness

This Toronto premiere will also play at Zurich and is likely to appeal to fans of The Lord Of The Rings, Braveheart and other sweeping sagas. Bang heads an international cast, including Connor Swindells, Golshifteh Farahani and Ben Kingsley, who should help raise the picture’s profile. 

Set in 1307, the film introduces the audience to William Tell (Bang) during his most infamous moment — he is about to attempt to shoot an apple off the head of his dear son Walter (Tobias Jowett) with a crossbow — and then flashes back a few days earlier, showing how that iconic scene came to be. Tired of war and seeking a peaceful life, William is reluctantly drawn into a conflict with invading Austrian forces, led by the loathsome Viceroy Gessler (Swindells), who wants to conquer Switzerland. William rallies his Swiss countrymen and women to take up arms against their oppressors, despite being outnumbered.

Hamm, whose films The Journey (2016) and Driven (2018) also screened at Toronto, gives the material a widescreen grandeur, with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay filling the frame with lush forests and ancient castles. (Italy artfully substitutes for Austria and Switzerland.) And Oscar- and Bafta-winning composer Steven Price juices the proceedings with soaring strings and pounding drums, underlining the stakes of Tell’s monumental undertaking.

But while William Tell looks and sounds like an epic, Hamm’s script (based on Friedrich Schiller’s early-19th-century play) concerns itself with palace intrigue and romantic subplots — including the growing love affair between Austrian Princess Bertha (Ellie Bamber) and Swiss-born Prince Rudenz (Jonah Hauer-King), who supports the Austrians before seeing the error in his ways — and these digressions add little texture or emotional shading to the story. It is, perhaps, revealing that William Tell opens on Tell aiming at the apple, Hamm drawing us in with the folk legend’s most well-known incident. Unfortunately, there is precious little beyond that indelible scene that distinguishes Tell from the many other cinematic warriors who must fight to defend all that they love. Bang gives the man a grizzled, haunted stoicism — flashbacks hint at some of the bloodshed he has experienced and now wants to forget — but, as impassioned as the actor is, both Tell’s words and actions are fairly generic for this kind of gruesome war picture.

Possibly as compensation, William Tell boasts a histrionic tone that’s always treated with utter earnestness. With Kingsley as a theatrical one-eyed Austrian king and Farahani playing Tell’s loyal wife Suna, screaming in anguish to punctuate every dramatic moment, the film occasionally feels ready to embrace a more unhinged, tongue-in-cheek approach. But that juicy vitality quickly gets tamped down by another dutiful exploration of honour and destiny. Even Swindells’ snide villain, who forces Tell to shoot that arrow at his son’s head, lacks the sparkle necessary to be a truly nasty nemesis.

Hamm tries to crank up the intensity, and gore, in the third act during an exciting storming-the-castle finale. Near the film’s end, a side character laments the ceaseless warring that has consumed Europe, wondering when such brutality might be a thing of the past. An ironic observation, considering that it is only when the characters are pummeling one another to death that this film finally comes to life.