"Jude Law immediately joins the upper ranks of the great screen Henry VIIIs" with his "incendiary" performance in this period drama, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Adapted from Elizabeth Fremantle's 2012 novel "Queen's Gambit", the film "takes as its subject the closing, paranoid and increasingly incapacitated years of Henry's reign, and specifically his relationship with his sixth and final wife Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander)".
We meet Henry in 1546, when he is "exhausted from the second invasion of France" and suffering from an ulcerated leg. "He seems a fiery beast initially, but one who is easily mollified by Katherine's attentiveness and her acquiescence in the brutal marital bedroom." Katherine, however, is depicted as close to, and possibly a former lover of, the radical Protestant reformer Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a relationship which, if discovered, could cost her her head. "There are some silly 11th-hour shenanigans involving a MacGuffin necklace and a dose of historical wish fulfilment", but this is a "vividly constructed drama, expertly played".
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