The Last Duel
Ridley Scott's The Last Duel is a sharp, topical character study disguised as a medieval epic. One of the most underrated films of his career.
The challenge with adapting any story built around sexual violence is that it almost always becomes about something other than the woman at the center of it. The courtroom procedural becomes about the legal system. The historical epic becomes about the pageantry of the period. The prestige drama becomes about the performances of the men in the room. What is relatively rare, and considerably harder to pull off, is a film that keeps its eye on the person with the least power in a given situation and refuses to look away, even when the story keeps trying to hand control back to the men competing over her. The Last Duel does not make that mistake, which is why it is one of the most underrated films Ridley Scott has made in a long career full of them.
Scott's filmography runs an unusual range: Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, The Martian. The breadth of it is such that most people can identify at least one Ridley Scott film as a personal favorite without the list overlapping much between them. His historical epics in particular have a well-established visual register, heavy on scale and production detail, and The Last Duel arrives looking like a film in that tradition. The trailers leaned hard into the battle sequences and the medieval carnage, which is a reasonable marketing decision and a significant misrepresentation of what the film actually is. This is not a war film. It is one of the more intimate and structurally precise character studies Scott has made, and the action sequences, as impressive as they are, exist to frame an argument rather than to be the argument themselves.
Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) is a knight of modest standing and considerable ego who has spent his career watching his social betters receive the advancement he believes he deserves. Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) is his former friend and increasingly powerful rival, backed by the patronage of Count Pierre d'Alençon (Ben Affleck). When Jean's wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) accuses Jacques of rape, Jean challenges him to a trial by combat, the last legally sanctioned duel in French history, with the stipulation that if Jean loses, Marguerite will be burned alive on the grounds that her accusation was false. The film tells this story in three chapters, each from the perspective of one of the principals: Jean's account, then Jacques's, then Marguerite's.
The Rashomon structure is the film's most audacious creative choice, and it earns it. The risk with this approach is repetition, and there are moments where returning to a shared scene for the third time tests your patience slightly. But what Scott and screenwriters Damon, Ben Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener do with those repeated moments is precise enough to justify the revisiting. A scene in which Jean instructs Marguerite to kiss Jacques as a gesture of goodwill plays three times in three completely different registers: friendly in Jean's telling, charged with romantic possibility in Jacques's, and flatly predatory in Marguerite's. The scene does not change. The people in it do. That single sequence explains what the film is doing better than any plot summary can.
Comer is the film's center and carries the weight of the third chapter, which is the longest and the only one the screenplay labels as "The Truth." Her Marguerite is precise about what she is navigating: a legal and social system in which her accusation puts her life at greater risk than her silence would have, presided over by men whose questions about her account would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has followed a sexual assault case in the last ten years. The film is not subtle about drawing that line. The institutional skepticism Marguerite faces, the pseudo-scientific claims offered by religious authorities as grounds for dismissing her, and the older noblewoman who chides her for coming forward at all because, as she puts it, that is simply what happens, are all pulled from a contemporary register and placed in the fourteenth century with deliberate intent. It lands because Comer makes Marguerite's calculation legible in every scene: she knows exactly what she has set in motion and what it will cost her if Jean loses.
That said, the film is also sharp enough to make both Jean and Jacques comprehensible even as it refuses to excuse them. By the time the duel arrives, the audience has spent enough time in both men's perspectives to understand how each of them arrived at their respective justifications, which makes neither of them sympathetic so much as recognizable. Jean's investment in the duel is not about Marguerite's justice; it is about his wounded pride. Driver makes Jacques's self-deception seamless, a man who has rewritten the same memory often enough that he no longer knows he's doing it. The film earns the grimness of its climax because it has been honest about who these people are the whole way through.
The action sequences that open and bookend the film are genuinely brutal, and worth flagging for anyone with a low threshold for medieval combat. Scott does not soften the physicality of fourteenth-century warfare, and the film's opening battle sequence establishes that animals are not off limits either. If The Revenant's violence was close to your ceiling, recalibrate your expectations before sitting down with this one. That said, the gore serves the film's argument about what this world actually looks like, and is not present for its own sake.
The Last Duel underperformed significantly at the box office on its original release, and the discourse around it tended to focus on that failure rather than what the film actually is. That is worth correcting. This is sharp, precise filmmaking from a director who could have coasted and chose not to, built around one of the strongest performances of Jodie Comer's career. It was worth seeing in theaters, and it is absolutely worth your time on home media now. Watch it.
