The White King

A rich and inti­mate account of total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment fea­tures at the core of Györ­gy Dragomán’s 2008 nov­el, ​‘The White King’. This ambi­tious adap­ta­tion by first-time film­mak­ers Alex Hel­frecht and Jörg Tit­tel relo­cates the sto­ry – told through the eyes of a pre-teen boy named Dja­ta – to an uniden­ti­fied Eng­lish-speak­ing, author­i­tar­i­an soci­ety set some­time in the future. This shift chill­ing­ly infers that this kind of night­mare could take place any­where, any time, but the film miss­es the dis­tinct­ly East­ern Euro­pean flavour that helps the nov­el stand out from sim­i­lar dystopi­an narratives.

It opens with a series of beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed mon­tage fea­tur­ing images of labour­ers, indus­try and mil­i­tary, which serves to immerse us into the Sovi­et back­drop of the nov­el. But the film quick­ly diverts its atten­tion and falls back on clichés of the genre. There are state man­dat­ed inter­coms in every home, rem­i­nis­cent of the icon­ic tele­screens described in George Orwell’s ​‘1984’, and at one point Dja­ta (new­com­er Loren­zo Allchurch) stum­bles across a chess-play­ing robot. This sequence adds lit­tle to the sto­ry and is indica­tive of an over-eager­ness to shoe­horn in ele­ments of sci-fi at the expense of focus­ing on con­vey­ing the abject hell­ish­ness of the environment.

In fact, the film doesn’t appear to have very much to say about state oppres­sion or the dan­gers of ubiq­ui­tous sur­veil­lance. What we do get is a suc­ces­sion of dis­joint­ed vignettes, includ­ing an ill-fat­ed trea­sure hunt, a tense con­fronta­tion with bul­lies and a vis­it to some gun-tot­ing grand­par­ents. The episod­ic struc­ture may have worked in prose, but the film suf­fers from a lack of coher­ence and momentum.

Allchurch and his on-screen moth­er and grand­fa­ther (Agy­ness Deyn and Jonathan Pryce) are well cast, but a lim­it­ed script, over­ly reliant on expo­si­tion (“You know you can’t be out past the cur­few!”), means that their per­for­mances come across as stilt­ed – more histri­on­ic than mov­ing. The White King is a respectable first fea­ture, but one that would have ben­e­fit­ted from refine­ment and nuance – a good few moves behind the best films in the genre.