‘A great deal of this actually happened,” reads the title card at the start of this action-packed historical epic. Possibly. But it’s unlikely that anyone actually said these words. Like an episode of Game of Thrones scripted by Guy Ritchie, there is a laddish finesse to the dialogue in this 16th-century tale of backstabbing and beheadings. “That sounds like a load of bollocks,” splutters the Danish king Christian II to an adviser in one scene. The actors are mostly Danes and Swedes speaking lines in English, plus a few Brits with a slight Scandi tinge to their accents.
The film is based on real events: the mass killing of Swedish nobles in 1520, ordered by Danish king Christian II (Claes Bang). The script gives history a revisionist twist or two: namely by adding a pair of aristocratic Swedish sisters, beautiful Anne (Sophie Cookson) and skilled hunter Freja (Alba August). The film opens with a massacre at Anne’s wedding perpetrated by King Christian’s attack dogs. The villains are all introduced with geezerish-gangster nicknames: there’s Didrik Slagheck (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) “AKA evilman”. Another is “guy with scar”.
