153 min | R | October 15, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
Two French knights, once friends, accuse each other of lies and settle it with a trial by combat. The same events play out three times, once from each man and once from the woman they both talk past. The men think the fight is about honor. The woman knows it is about her.
Sir Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris are friends turned rivals in 14th-century France. When Carrouges accuses Le Gris of raping his wife Marguerite, the dispute goes to a trial by combat. God will decide who tells the truth, and if Carrouges loses, Marguerite burns. Ridley Scott tells the story three times, once from each man and once from the woman. The structure is the whole argument. The men narrate their own honor and grievance. Marguerite narrates what actually happens, and the gap between her version and theirs is the film.
Matt Damon plays Carrouges as a brutal, aggrieved man who mistakes his wounded pride for justice. He scowls through every scene certain that the world owes him standing it refuses to grant. Adam Driver plays Le Gris with smooth entitlement, a courtier who reads Marguerite’s resistance as part of a game he is winning. Jodie Comer plays Marguerite as the only person in the room paying attention. She watches both men talk past her and registers every small humiliation, and in her chapter the same events land with weight the men never feel. Ben Affleck plays Count Pierre as a bored aristocrat who treats cruelty as entertainment.
Ridley Scott directs medieval France as mud, cold, and stone. The script by Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon assigns the men’s chapters to Damon and Affleck and Marguerite’s to Holofcener, and the writing shifts accordingly. Scott repeats key scenes across the three accounts with deliberate small changes in framing and emphasis. A glance that reads as flirtation in Le Gris’s version reads as fear in Marguerite’s. The duel itself is shot as exhausting and graceless, two armored men hacking at each other while a woman’s life hangs on the outcome. The production design refuses any romance about the period.
The film knows exactly what it is about. Two men fight to the death over a woman’s body, and neither one asks the woman what she wants. The Rashomon structure could feel like a gimmick, but the repetition builds the point instead of decorating it. The men remember themselves as heroes, and the truth belongs to the person nobody listens to. Scott takes a medieval rape case and builds a clean machine for showing how power decides whose story counts.