TIFF Review: ‘The Lost King’ Is A Modest But Thoroughly Captivating Tale

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William Shakespeare rather definitively defined Richard the Third as a deformed, conniving, duplicitous and altogether unsavory monarch in his 1485 play, and the man’s image as such has persisted ever since.But that all changed nearly a decade ago when an obscure amateur historian sniffed around and ultimately uncovered the burial site beneath a downtown Leicester parking lot, a story that has now been beguilingly recounted in The Lost King.

It’s a modest but thoroughly captivating tale that has the look and feel of so many good British films of 25 or 30 years ago, a quality that can no doubt be significantly attributed to that reliable all-rounder Stephen Frears at the helm.Delightfully written by costar Steve Coogan and the prolific television writer Jeff Pope, this is a story somewhat in the vein of Preston Sturges’ little-man-makes-good human comedies, in which an unlikely nobody suddenly becomes something akin to a folk hero.

In this case, it’s a woman who not only defies conventional wisdom, but upsets academic norms by behaving rather more like an intuitive detective than a doctrinaire historian.

It’s a wonderful script tailor made for Sally Hawkins, who is, unsurprisingly, smashing as an amateur of few means who defiantly soldiers on until she quite literally gets to the bottom of things.Philippa Langley’s position in life could scarcely be seem promising; although she and her husband John (a wonderfully self-deprecating Coogan) are no longer together, as it were, they’re still living in exceptionally close quarters under the same Edinburgh roof with a tiny tot, the responsibility for whom largely falls to John, as they have no financial options.