Featured Essays Pilgrimage Let’s Talk About That Time Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal Played Medieval Irish Monks Even without the costumes of Spider-man and the Punisher, Holland and Bernthal play out a similar dynamic… By Leah Schnelbach | Published on July 29, 2026 Credit: RLJE Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: RLJE Films Pilgrimage is a strange film. It’s dark, and violent, and kind of a Catholic version of Lord of the Rings—or, well, a more blatantly Catholic version I guess, as it’s about a group of medieval Irish Catholic monks. Somehow a monastery clinging to the western shore of Ireland ended up with a powerful relic that traveled all the way from the Holy Land. Because a new Crusade looms on the horizon, Pope Innocent III sends a monk named Brother Geraldus to retrieve it and bring it to Rome, and thence to the Holy Land, where it’s believed it will help them against infidels and heretics. In most movies of this type the relic would be a piece of the True Cross, a scrap of a significant shroud, a fingerbone or the tooth of a saint, and it would have a mystical healing property.  Not here. Here the relic, the holy artifact that the monks have vowed to protect with their lives, is the rock that was used to murder St. Matthias—who wasn’t even one of the original twelve apostles, but rather a man chosen by lot to replace Judas Iscariot. An apostolic substitute player, basically. The rock has a very dark vengeful miracle associated with it, which has given it a reputation more akin to Spielberg’s version of the Ark of the Covenant than any sort of miraculous healing properties. And the big catch? Supposedly the relic can bring great harm to people who touch it—even the devoted monks try not to touch it, or look at it too long.   But why am I writing about a decade-old Irish medieval monk movie this week? Credit: RLJE Films Well it’s because Tom Holland plays a novitiate monk named Diarmuid who becomes the Darkly Miraculous Rock-Bearer, and Jon Bernthal plays his muscle, a silent, stoic, man with puppy dog eyes and an enormous cross tattooed across his back, who turns out to be very capable of violence. Between seeing Holland and Bernthal together in The Odyssey last week, and the upcoming Punisher/Spidey team-up in Brand New Day, I thought it would be fun to revisit this movie that I half-remembered liking nine years ago. And I was right! This movie’s fantastic. Very obviously small and indie, but weird and gritty and very much itself. While I liked The Odyssey very much, Pilgrimage does a lot of what I think Nolan should have done to create a feeling of uncanniness, and honor the true otherness of the past. And while I’ve loved Holland and Bernthal as Spidey and The Punisher, here they’re able to inhabit ground-level characters who make impossible moral choices in the real world—it felt kind of refreshing after years of superhero films, but also of a piece with their other performances. Holland plays a boy trying to prove himself to men with exacting standards, an Bernthal plays a man pushed into unspeakable violence by forces larger than him—just with no access to web shooters or sniper rifles. The plot is a simple road trip made rich with detail. The monks have to carry their relic to the port at Waterford, whence it will sail to France and then be carried across Europe to Rome. They have the protection of a few Norman guards, but given that the Irish are actively warring against the Normans, and that there are all manner of bandits between them and Waterford, the odds of everyone making it there and back again are slim. Pilgrimage is startlingly historically accurate, accurate to a point that the filmmakers seem not to care whether the audience can keep up. Even in the opening scene, the martyrdom of St. Matthias is brutal and short. Any idea of the glory of dying for God is dispensed with as the first rock flies. When the film skips from the Holy Land up to Ireland in 1209 C.E., there’s no romanticized misty valley full of scholars and saints—the monastery is a few small stacked stone, beehive-shaped buildings, a couple of open air huts, an ogham stone, a paddock. This isn’t the bustling center of learning in The Secret of Kells, this is a rough-hewn community that harvests seaweed and sea cucumbers for food. The Normans have invaded Ireland, and regard the Irish with barely concealed disgust. Some of the Irish, angry at having been invaded, have gone back to their pre-Christian ways. And of course, the English hover on the edges of the story, just waiting to cause trouble. This leaves our poor monks in a terrible position, as they want peace and brotherhood that would unite all people. Or at least all men—there are no women in this film. (Historically speaking, women religious would have had high status and shared monasteries with their brothers a few centuries earlier, but I think things were a bit more segregated by the 1200s, as the Irish church was forced to fall in line with Rome’s authority.) The factions are broken out in language: the Irish monks speak Irish, which was still spoken all over the country at that time. The Normans speak French, and the Latin that all the characters hold in common is played here by English, i assume to save us some subtitles. Only one monk speaks all three languages. The Normans and Geraldus are visibly annoyed when the Irish monks speak their native tongue. (And I am ecstatic to report both that Tom Holland does a good job with the language [at least to my ear] and that I understood a lot of the dialogue! The classes I’m taking in the back of that Irish pub are paying off!) Credit: RLJE Films The violence is brutal and matter-of-fact. The peace-loving monks are suddenly in a world of soldiers, where the solution to most problems involves inflicting pain, and the monks’ values are only held in high regard by the few men who have reached old age, and fear the judgement they face after death. But the film keeps this realistic, too. Fights are short, grappling, close-combat between terrified men who grab and chop at each other with  with swords or shield edges, everyone aware that death is only a breath away. There is a torture scene that is among the most upsetting things I’ve ever seen, but I wouldn’t call it gratuitous, it’s more that the film fully creates a world and commits to it. Brother Diarmuid is utterly out of his depth. He was seemingly raised by the monks—at one point an elder, Brother Ciaran, says the monastery is all he’s ever known—but does he even want to be a monk? In another difference from The Secret of Kells, Diarmuid isn’t like that film’s Brendan, a gifted young artist who feels a real calling, and apprentices himself to a master illuminator. Diarmuid has no special skills or otherworldly devotion. He’s grown up with the monks, knows nothing of the world outside, and finds himself fighting to survive, fighting to hold onto some level of his beliefs and moral values, with no real choice. He becomes the bearer of the relic partly by chance, and partly because the older men accept that his innocence might allow him to carry it without harm. Tom Holland is fantastic. I am among those who feel his acting has been a bit stiff for the last few projects—I rewatched the earlier Spider-mans and he’s great in them, funny and quick and with so much heart pouring out of his eyes. I thought he did well in The Odyssey, but it was still a bit restrained. Here, though, he shifts between English and Irish  with no hesitation, he fully embodies this character as he goes from a sweet, naive boy to a terrified young man desperately trying to survive a nightmare. Credit: RLJE Films Jon Bernthal plays a man whom everyone calls “The Mute” who literally washed up at the monastery, and acts as a servant to the monks, doing all the physical labor they can’t do. He is also devoted to Diarmuid. Was he a crusader? Are there bloody deeds in his past? Does he work for the monks to earn forgiveness and absolution? Is there some design in this troubled man turning up in a holy place, shortly before they’ll need his strength? He also gives an excellent performance, as he flicks his wounded eyes around, looking for all the world like a dog ho doesn’t want to get kicked… right up until his old life activates inside him and he turns into a wild-eyed berserker. The relationship between Diarmuid and his guardian is lovely. We learn that Diarmuid is the one who found the Mute (I assume he argued for him to be taken in like a lost puppy) and he never fears him. While the Normans speculate on his bloody past, and Geraldus attempts to use him as God’s chosen warrior, Diarmuid accepts him as he is. But again the film sticks to realism: Diarmuid is a boy in a world of men, and has no real power or ability to shield the Mute from other people’s cruelty; the Mute has a past, he’s weighed down by the belief that he needs to atone and that his strength will help him do that—but he is still a man, not a superhero. While he is stronger than most of the dangers the group encounters, there are still limits. These two are caught between Brother  Ciarán, wise, sad, desperately wishing he could protect the brothers from the world, Frère  Geraldus, a French Cistercian whose eyes light up with dangerous glee every time he talks about who belongs in Hell, and Raymond de Merville, a Norman nobleman who hates Ireland, has no great love for the church, and wants only power and glory, here and now. After all, there will always be another Crusade, and another shot at earning points for the afterlife. Richard Armitage is gorgeous as Raymond, snide, venomous, and devoid of pity. And John Lynch and Stanley Weber are beautifully matched as kind Ciarán and fanatical Geraldus. When the brothers head out on their journey, under the dubious protection of Raymond, the three men’s conflicting desires set them on a tragic path. Credit: RLJE Films Even at their best, pilgrimages are complicated things. The ideal version is a person or group of people travelling to a holy site out of devotion, hitting pause on their regular day-to-day life to be part of a larger community, to focus on their faith or their morality, maybe to do some good for people along the way. In reality, of course, pilgrimages are chaotic, expensive, and open to exploitation like anything. You have to have the money and privilege to be able to travel in the first place. You have to take time off, book lodging, buy food—all the stuff you’d have to do for vacation, but with the added burden of knowing that the trip has to mean something. You’re supposed to come back different. Holier, maybe. (People certainly end up “hole-ier” in Pilgrimage, but not in the way they might hope.) Titling this film “Pilgrimage” is a grim joke. The monks are removing the relic from its resting place—how it came into their possession we never know—and they’re taking it as a weapon, much as the Ark of the Covenant used to be carried. But even that isn’t enough, as the trip is hijacked for an even grubbier political scheme before it has the chance to be used as a weapon in a holy war. The movie gets across the extreme difficulty of medieval travel. You walk for days only to find that the bridge is out, and the only other path you can take is many more days of walking back the way you just came. Any time you meet another group on the path could mean your death. Any time you walk through a dense forest could mean bandits setting on you like ravenous wolves. And on top of that, this is a world of magic. Trees have symbols carved into them—guideposts? Warnings? Pleas to gods and spirits? The good Christian monks look askance at all of them, but they respect the Old Ways, and shudder from drinking water that flows past a fairy fort. The French Cistercian brother is infuriated by this, as he’s infuriated by most things, and the movie does a beautiful job of revealing his layers of zealotry—what would today be called fundamentalism—without ever tipping into anachronism. Credit: RLJE Films I’ve wanted to write about this movie for a while. I think it’s an excellent portrait of a fascinating time in history. A lot of people overplay their hand with this particular topic, out of an overabundance of pride in their Irish heritage, a belief in a kind of New Agey Celtic mysticism, or the tendency that’s hilariously called “Gaelmaxxxing” in certain corners of the internet now. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the Irish saved Western Civilization, because that discounts the work of a lot of people across Europe and the Middle East, Christian, Jews, Muslims, crypto-pagans, and people who probably considered themselves as unaffiliated as it was possible to be in that time, who were all copying manuscripts and making art and singing songs to try to keep the lights on, as it were. But, Irish culture is one my Special Interests. And it is deeply moving to me to think of these people in their tiny cold round huts working by candlelight, with no way of knowing if anything would survive the Norsemen or the British or general apathy, or if Doomsday would come and none of their work would matter anyway. I think about them a lot, these days, as people cede their own brains to “AI” and ChatGPT and Claude, as people take work away from living artists and hand it off to machines, as they cheer the tech billionaires who are destroying our one shared home and just salivating at the idea of turning us all into serfs. I think I love this movie so much because it honors the romance of that time, and the bravery of it, while also showing the reality of life, how harsh it was, how much zealotry and bigotry fueled things.[end-mark] The post Let’s Talk About That Time Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal Played Medieval Irish Monks appeared first on Reactor.