Column Mark as Read The Specific Bliss of Just Not Having an Opinion (Sometimes) In a world of hot takes, it’s nice to take a break… By Molly Templeton | Published on July 30, 2026 Image: Universal Pictures Comment 1 Share New Share Image: Universal Pictures The Odyssey takes are everywhere. The takes are begetting takes; if they are not takes on Christopher Nolan’s film, they are takes on translator Emily Wilson’s take on Nolan’s film. These takes have in turn begotten takes on the takes on Wilson’s take. It is takeception (appropriately enough). Bluesky is a take ouroboros. The takes are eating their tails. This is not an Odyssey take. This is a take on not having a take. To be perhaps exceedingly clear, though, this is not about being too cool for school, or looking down one’s nose at the takes, or not letting people like things, or, for that matter, not letting people not like things. No: What I want to talk about is how sometimes it is bliss to cultivate no opinion whatsoever. At present I have no opinion about The Odyssey, as I have not seen it, and no opinion about any of the takes on The Odyssey for the same reason. I do, alas, seem to have a take on some of the takes about Emily Wilson’s take—which is to say that I disagree with those people who think she should keep her mouth shut because the movie is making her money. That is capitalism brain talking. She owes no allegiance to a film she had nothing to do with. Let the woman opine! Let everyone opine. But if you would like to take a break from opining, please, for this moment, come sit by me. Most of the time, I have a lot of opinions. Professionally, I have opinions. Personally, I have opinions. We all have opinions. I have things I like and things I don’t like, things that make me grin in delight and things that make me slouch in dismal grumpiness. The internet has trained many of us into nigh-obsessive opinion-having (and if you are not one of those people thus trained, I salute you!). Between twenty years of writing about books and movies and more years than that of being online, I sometimes find that I am forming opinions without trying. This book looks great! That movie seems like a waste of time! Why is there another hot take about [insert hot take topic here]?  This is when I try very hard to stop. I do not need to have an opinion about everything I read about. I do not need to have an opinion about Taylor Swift or Dungeon Crawler Carl or House of the Dragon. In the best case scenario I can acknowledge these things and then simply let them pass out of my awareness.  But I must be honest: This requires work. It is a conscious choice to not have an opinion. To not care. To not be annoyed by the omnipresence of certain things at what feels like the expense of others. I was a pop culture obsessive from a young age, raised on Entertainment Weekly and Spin lists in the days before listicles were everywhere. It is hard to stop ranking and sorting and comparing. It is especially hard when there’s a deep temptation to focus on these things as a distraction, a diversion from all the horrors in the world. Having an opinion is easy. Pointing that attention somewhere else can be less so. There’s another way to say all this, which is to say that it is important to cultivate an awareness of the instances in which things are not for you. I don’t mean “not for you” in a permission sort of way, but in the sense that we all have likes and dislikes, things we are more or less inclined to enjoy. Some things will not fit within your joy boundaries. Let them! Let them hang out over there, wherever there is. You don’t have to pay any attention to them. You may possibly be happier if you don’t pay attention to them. This does not mean you can’t dislike things. Letting people not like things is important. Let haters hate; let lovers love; acknowledge that haters and lovers are often the same people, just pointed at different things. Sometimes I love Doctor Who and sometimes I hate Doctor Who, and when I hate it, it’s because I want to love it. Sometimes I hate a book I wanted to love, and sometimes the opposite happens. I feel very strongly that you have to let yourself be wrong about things as often as possible.  Cultivating a lack of unnecessary opinion is a good way to open yourself up to that joyful, expansive kind of being wrong. I don’t need to have opinions about horror or romance novels in general because those are not in my lane. I love the horror and romance communities; I love that these once-dismissed categories are dominating. I love underdog stories. But as a super-baby who is also rarely invested in a happily ever after, those genres are rarely for me. That isn’t a judgment, but an awareness: I don’t read them a lot, so when I do make an exception and pick a horror or romance novel up, I have to be aware of my ignorance. I have to try, really try, to not form any opinions ahead of time. To be a blank slate of curiosity. Which is to say, in a roundabout way, that a lack of opinion is frequently a temporary state. I’m not going to be opinion-free about a book I’ve read, though I may try very hard to be opinion-free about an author’s later books if I have not enjoyed an early one. People change! Writers change! Readers change! What we’re looking for in the books we love might change week to week, or year to year. Or never. I have been wrong about books I thought I would like and wrong about books I thought I would hate. The space where expectations and opinions overlap is large and sometimes difficult to navigate, but I just keep saying to myself, Maybe I’m wrong about that. I’ll have an opinion about The Odyssey eventually. I am neither a Nolan hater nor a Nolan lover, though I may be something of a Nolan skeptic after Tenet. (My favorite is The Prestige.) I will wait until I no longer feel like I’m swimming in a (wine-dark) sea of other people’s opinions, and I’ll go form my own.  But to be honest, I kind of like not having one at all.[end-mark] The post The Specific Bliss of Just Not Having an Opinion (Sometimes) appeared first on Reactor.

News Wicker Alexander Skarsgård Is Made for Olivia Colman in New Wicker Trailer Do you have questions? I too have questions By Molly Templeton | Published on July 30, 2026 Screenshot: Black Bear Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Black Bear Yes, there’s a wicker man; no, he’s not that kind of wicker man. In Wicker, Alexander Skarsgård once again undergoes a cinematic transformation, this time becoming a man literally made of wicker. He is made by Peter Dinklage at the request of Olivia Colman, who plays an unpopular fisherwoman in search of a husband. Totally logical, all of that. If you’re thinking this sounds like a bit of a fairy tale, well, it does, though Wicker is described as “an audacious comedic fable about sex, marriage, and the absurdities of social convention,” which, okay, sold! The wicker husband has many talents, it appears, some of which keep the fisherwoman’s disapproving neighbors (which include Elizabeth Debicki) up at night. He has to fix the bed a few times. Wicker is written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who also wrote and directed the extremely charming Save Yourselves!; they adapted Ursula Willis’ short story “The Wicker Husband.” Fischer and Wilson are reason enough to see this movie, but there are more: on top of that endearing cast, it has The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley; Poor Things production designer Renátó Cseh; and a “fully practical suit” that brings the wicker man to life, courtesy of Joe Dunckley and Wētā Workshop (The Lord of the Rings). According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Wicker is, essentially, a social treatise on equal partnership, urging husbands of any time, in any place, to be mindful of their spouse’s needs, to find joy in their joy, comfort in their comfort.” Richard Lawson writes, “It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect. But I suppose that’s somewhat apt for our squalid present tense, in which so many of our own fellow townspeople seem to be digging in their heels and refusing to evolve. Their loss, Wicker says with a tart and withering smile.” Wicker is in limited release on October 23rd, and goes wide on October 30th.[end-mark] The post Alexander Skarsgård Is Made for Olivia Colman in New <i>Wicker</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Books unlikeable characters Your Protagonist Is a Terrible Person — Can They Still Be Likable? Sure, they’re utterly reprehensible — but you still want readers to root for them. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on July 30, 2026 Teddy Bears Never Die cover art by Andy Bourne Comment 0 Share New Share Teddy Bears Never Die cover art by Andy Bourne Suppose that you are an author. Suppose you want to write about a protagonist who not only has a slight flaw in their character, they are by any objective measure reprehensible (as we’ve discussed, there are more than a few examples of this phenomenon in science fiction and fantasy). Further, suppose your purpose is not to provide the audience with the opportunity for delicious disapproval of appalling behavior. You want the readers to like your terrible, terrible protagonist. What is a hardworking author to do1? I can think of several options… A common approach is to provide the protagonist with a tragic backstory that explains how circumstances beyond their control set them on their dark path. Maybe criminals killed their family! Perhaps they grew up a feral child in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Or maybe their father ate their last French fry. If their past is dark enough, it’s hard to blame them for their present. In Aliette de Bodard’s 2023 A Fire Born of Exile, naïve scholar Dã Lan was betrayed and condemned. Years later, wealthy but seemingly unremarkable social climber Quỳnh appears. They are, of course, Dã Lan in a new guise, returned to exact revenge on the people she blames for her downfall. Who would not want to pay evil unto evil? One can always place the protagonist in a milieu where any sort of decency is synonymous with suicide2. In a world where a boot is stamping on a human face forever, the best available option may be to be the one wearing the boot. If there are no better choices available, nobody can be blamed for not taking one. Despite the previous paragraph, this doesn’t have to involve dystopia. Simply present your protagonist with a sufficiently challenging context—existential threats on the scale of nuclear war or total ecological collapse aren’t necessary. Even a small thing like a shipwreck will do, if no help is coming—assert there are insufficient resources to save everyone, toss in phrases such as “lifeboat rules,” and Bob’s your uncle. Well, until you toss Bob overboard for being surplus to requirements. Take, for example, Cho Yeeun’s 2023 Teddy Bears Never Die’s co-protagonists Hwayoung and Doha. Hwayoung’s quest for justice for her mother’s murder left her a potential victim for ruthless landlords, gangsters, and serial killers. Axe-wielding teddy bear Doha would like his human body back. Hesitation to take certain bold steps would not simply ensure failure but death… and possibly worse. Another option is to confront your protagonist with people who are even worse. Is your protagonist a ruthless mercenary willing to work for anyone with sufficient gold? Set them against the fanatical armies of a dark Sauronian overlord bent on WORLD CONQUEST. Does your protagonist have anger management issues? They won’t look so bad compared to sex traffickers. Is your lead a little bit murderous? That’s better than being extremely homicidal. Not only is being morally compromised usually better than being a moral vacuum, the narrative can make the case that the protagonist serves a useful purpose. After all, without the flawed character being willing to do unpleasant but necessary things, evil might run amok—when you think about it, anyone who protests is objectively on evil’s side. Jorj X. McKie of Frank Herbert’s 1970 Whipping Star lacks many of the positive qualities one might want in a human. Just ask his fifty-plus ex-wives. However, not only do his defects make him an exemplary Bureau of Sabotage agent, even at his worst Jorj is a far better person than antagonist Mliss Abnethe, who even now plots to annihilate the ConSentiency with weaponized bottom-spanking. Finally, you’d be surprised how forgiving audiences are of protagonists who are sufficiently charming, cute, or attractive. Provide the lead with witty banter, depict them being adorably inept at adulting, or wrap their smoking hot body in a couple of scarves or perhaps a speedo. Minor lapses like serial confidence games, spree killings, or the odd total planetary destruction will be overlooked or waved away. It’s just the way human brains are wired. Yugo Sakamoto’s 2021 Gen-Z slacker black-comedy Baby Assassins is the work that send my mind down this path. Recent high school graduates Mahiro and Chisato would be by any objective measure terrible people, lacking as they do discipline, ethics, patience, or attention spans longer than a few minutes. Plus, they leave a trail of corpses in their wake. However, they’re just so adorable together it’s easy for forgive minor peccadillos such as their lack of adulting skills and a body count higher than Hannibal Lecter’s. And if all of the above fail? Turn your gaze outward. Look for an audience for whom vice is virtue, people who delight in trainwrecks, folks who would really like to watch the world burn even if only second-hand. Somewhere out there, there may be prospective fans who would be thrilled to see bad people do terrible things. All you need to do is find them.I sense providing examples in this specific case would be an error from a comments section-maintenance perspective. Have I omitted other useful options? Given that I initially could only think of three approaches, almost certainly. Feel free to extol the virtues of your favourites in comments below.[end-mark] Yes, yes, uncontrollable weeping in the shower is always an option. It’s just not a very useful one. ︎Which puts me in mind of the kids in Battle Royale who refuse to be forced into the adults’ evil game and simply jump off a cliff. Sometimes, the only way to win is not to play. ︎ The post Your Protagonist Is a Terrible Person — Can They Still Be Likable? appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go” This vacation carries a terrible curse… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on July 29, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go,” first published in Kristy Park Kulski’s Stoker-winning Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror From the Asian Diaspora. Spoilers ahead! CW for suicidal ideation. Della and Mary are vacationing on the Indonesian island of Java. Della was born there, but her parents immigrated to the United States when she was young; since their household mostly spoke English, Della’s now embarrassed by her rusty Indonesian. Blond-haired Mary’s Indonesian is worse, but she gets points for her “try-hard shamelessness.” The two were college friends, and the bolder Mary always took the lead. She still does. Della chose their hotel with Mary’s preferences in mind. Now, as they lounge by the pool, Mary fidgets to get them out of it. A child’s fallen into the water, causing consternation among relatives. Della thinks how she might step into the pool, or off their third-floor balcony, or off a curb even. The critical thing: Her movement would have to be “stupid easy,” or she’d never take it, never make everything “go away.” Mary ignores the poolside fuss. She reads from Things to Know Before You Go: Indonesia. There’s a jungle hike that sounds cool, with a “sacred” path leading to a waterfall reserved for “members of the spirit world.” She laughs “uproariously” at the notion. Della, who had a superstitious Indonesian babysitter, tries to dissuade Mary from the outing, with her usual success. After six hours on a rickety bus up the Javanese mountains, Mary commands the driver to drop them at the trailhead. An old woman grabs Della’s arm and delivers a warning in mixed Indonesian and Javanese, from which Della gathers the syllables “Tuk” and “Kutuk.” Off the bus, she’ll remember that “kutukan” means “curse.” A wooden box demands an access fee of ten thousand rupiah for Indonesians, fifty thousand for foreigners. Della tries to deposit the foreigner’s fee. Mary talks her into the lower one. The remoteness and quiet of the trailhead disconcert Della. Where are the usual locals selling snacks or guide services? There’s not even a stray goat! Prickly vines obscure the trail. Mary pushes them apart and steps into darkness. Della follows. She reminds Mary that they have to catch the bus home by 4, earning exasperation. Can’t Della relax? Act like she wants to be here? Della can’t. She doesn’t like the way the trail proper is meticulously well-maintained, how sunlight penetrates the jungle canopy “uncomplicated by either heat or shadow.” Mary derides her fear they’re crossing into the spirit world, and asks sarcastically about protections. But Della’s babysitter, Mbak Susi, never provided any such hints, or even a definitive way of knowing one had passed beyond, other than “You’ll know.” Mary leads them up the path, which looks level but feels like it’s going uphill. She scolds on, about how Della doesn’t want to go to bars or clubs or even on a tame nature walk. Every time Mary suggests something, Della’s all no, no, no, but makes no suggestions herself. Della says she wishes they’d gone to Thailand. She pushes past Mary, expecting a snide remark, getting only “What is that?” Della looks back, at an empty trail. Mary has vanished. Kutukan, Della remembers. Curse. * * * Mary must have fallen off the path somehow, maybe broken an ankle, but Della searches the underbrush and finds no trace. She must be “losing it,” getting dehydrated and scared. She’s “regressing” to Mbak Susi’s horror stories, which were only fables designed to obliquely teach children about real dangers. She shouldn’t have left the main trail. She should’ve gone back to the road for help. If she had to succumb to delusions of a spirit world, she should dwell on Mbak Susi’s reassurance: The spirit world isn’t evil. It just knows how to bring out the wickedness in you. * * * She walks on. Finally she finds an isolated police outpost. The officer inside listens to her vague description of how Mary disappeared. She’s afraid Mary might have gotten hurt. He interjects, “Wasn’t that what you wanted to happen? When you pushed her?” So easy, it would have been, Mary always walking in front, Della the Dutiful always following. She always resented Mary, didn’t she? Was jealous of her, as she is of all her friends. The officer has this direct from Mbak Susi. And he produces a folder with the babysitter’s testimony…. Della denies the insinuations. Mbak Susi never knew about Mary, hasn’t seen Della for years, and besides, what if Della were jealous? What matters is that Mary’s gone! No, the officer says. She’s here with them. All Della has to do is look under the bushes to find Mary waiting for her. The outpost walls dissolve. Della averts her eyes from the yellow eyes, staring from the darkness. Again she insists she can’t find Mary. The officer sighs and tells her to sign a missing-persons report. The paper he slides over doesn’t look like a missing-person’s report. Its words squirm as Della tries to read. It occurs to her how easily she understood the officer’s language, how her own words had flowed to him. “Is this a dream?” she asks. “No,” he replies, handing her a pen. When she clicks it open, it hisses. * * * Locals find Mary first, evidently fallen several hundred meters below the main path. So alone, so pretty, so white. They worry her death will awaken rumors of evil. Della is found later, much deeper in the jungle. Her necrosis suggests death by pit viper, which relieves the locals’ fears of murder. The Americans’ story is a familiar one, young women gone into a remote forest without a guide and “fallen prey not to predators but to their own inexperience, their naivete, their loud and unrelenting ignorance.” It’s a “profound unbelonging,” and the land won’t expend its energy to forgive them. The Degenerate Dutch: In college, Della uses her Indonesian background as a “party trick.” She bites her tongue to avoid complaint about people’s reactions, which still doesn’t justify Mary mocking Indonesian beliefs and customs. Or Indonesian population density, a joke that isn’t funny at all. Libronomicon: This week’s shelf features Things to Know Before You Go: Indonesia, a useful guidebook that, among other things, describes a cool jungle hike. Why guidebooks are pointing people at spirit-world-only waterfalls… well, why not? It’s a bit of harmless local color. Madness Takes Its Toll: Della suggests “crazy people” as something to fear in the jungle, or perhaps the source of stories about the jungle’s dangers. The locals who find Mary’s body fear rumors “spiraling into ugly themes of madness and darkness and evil,” and are relieved to find clues to a different narrative. Ruthanna’s Commentary It’s a terribly pat trope: representatives of “civilization” visit someplace “exotic” as conquerors, missionaries, tourists, etc., only to discover to their detriment that the local “superstitions” are true. Done badly, as it historically is, it manages to maintain the conviction of all those scare-quoted words even as the locals turn out to know more than the newcomers. But really, doesn’t having your scary stories pan out simply go to prove how primitive you are? After all, so much of the value of civilized empire comes in making magic impossible. Column favorite Bulkin isn’t doing the trope badly at all, nor playing it straight. She’s asking what it means to be a tourist or a local, and what it means to know a place at all. Mary’s the more traditional visitor. She’s well-educated, white, confident in her privilege and comfortable outside her comfort zone. It earns forgiveness in a country that “doesn’t spend its fleeting energy trying to forgive.” Or perhaps it excuses her from offending in the first place. Mispronouncing her limited Indonesian, she compares well with others who look like her but insist on English. Della, on the other hand, falls into the awkward un-belonging of the diaspora. She looks local, remembers a few people and a few stories, and yet her language has lapsed. Mary’s A-for-effort is her shameful failure. Naturally more cautious than her companion, she also knows just enough to realize that there’s real danger in the country her family left. Mary’s having an adventure, confident that she can deal with whatever little difficulties arise. Certainly, anything that shows up in the guidebook must be safe to try. Della knows “misery and malice and lack.” She knows stories about why you should be scared, and none about how to survive the scary things. You’re supposed to avoid them, after all, not seek them out. She knows, too, that those stories are warnings, if not always accurate ones. But it’s been intellectualized: she wrote a Comparative Religions essay about “social programming through storytelling.” This is a real, common thing. Where western parents lay out blunt rules, many cultures use ghosts and monsters as a memorable way to warn kids away from misbehavior. Della’s babysitter, with her haunted bamboo, is a good example. Ghosts are more exciting than thorns, easier to remember. Ghouls and beasties out beyond well-lit streets can keep people close, safe, even compliant. But “we” the “civilized” know better. And Della knows that she’s supposed to know better—to giggle at “crazy people” and make the spirit world a joke. In America, she’s let her origins become “the most interesting thing about her.” She has stories about Indonesia rather than stories about herself. Other friends have Lyme disease or affairs with ethics professors, which I have to imagine go over less well at Thanksgiving. In Indonesia, then, her misery is in part the loss of that identity and the realization of how shallow it’s always been. The country is no longer hers, but neither is anywhere else. And Mary’s irritated that Della can be neither a native guide nor a full-on cheerful tourist. What would have happened, I have to wonder, if Della had fallen into one clear category or the other? Obviously if she were a true Indonesian, she’d have insisted on avoiding the jungle to begin with, or at least understood and heeded the elder’s warning on the bus. But if she knew nothing of the spirit world, could it have touched her at all? Could Mary have traipsed the vine-draped path solo, with no worse worries than snakes? Per the traditional trope, civilized visitors must either be entirely vulnerable, or protected by their imperial limits on reality. Here, I suspect, it’s Della’s own liminal nature that makes her vulnerable to the liminal threat. But then, the local story has her and Mary as two undifferentiated “young American women” full of “loud and unrelenting ignorance” and “profound unbelonging.” So Della loses her identity once again in death. It’s a warning not against exploring the darkness, but against doing so without being very clear about who you are, and where you do and don’t belong. Claim yourself, or something else will claim you. Anne’s Commentary Among Della’s  memories of her early life in Indonesia loom large Mbak Susi’s stories about Jagad Lelembut, or the spirit world. This paper in Javanologi: The International Journal of Javanese Studies describes the concept: “Javanese society holds a profound and enduring belief in the supernatural world, a system deeply interwoven with daily life and transmitted across generations. At its core lies the conviction that all elements of nature possess a spirit or soul (animism) and supernatural powers (dynamism). Trees, rivers, mountains, and even inanimate objects are imbued with spiritual significance… This stems from a core Javanese understanding of the intimate connection between the spiritual and the material realms.” The entities one might encounter in Jagad Lelembut range from local guardian spirits and ancestral forces, to the shapeshifting trickster Genderuwo, to vengeful human ghosts and sentient floating fireballs (banaspati.) My choice of most terrifying would be the Kuyang, a living witch who transforms at night into a vampiric disembodied head trailing its own viscera behind. Maybe Della meets one of these during her deep jungle wanderings. Maybe the necrotic state of her corpse was the result of a Kuyang battening onto her. Instead of the pit viper that authorities blame. In my obsessive zeal for identifying the unnamed snakes of weird fiction, I looked up the chief Javanese suspects. In addition to the Flat-nosed Pit Viper (Craspedocephalus puniceus) and Malayan Pit Viper (Calloselasma rhodostoma), there are three Trimeresurus species: the White-lipped Pit Viper (T. albolabris), the Mangrove Pit Viper (T. purpureomaculatus), and recent cartoon superstar, the Indonesian or Sunda Island Pit Viper (T. insularis). And now, back to our regularly scheduled nonherpetological programming. Bulkin’s story combines two highly compatible horror sub-sub-genres: The Vacation from Hell and the Clash of the Frenemies. How could two people as dissimilar as Mary and Della have ever gotten together? Okay, there was the crucible of the neighboring college dorm rooms, but why did they stay enough in touch after graduation to go on a major vacation together? Actually, it may be only too credible a bad bromance. Della gives Alpha-Blonde Mary someone she can always pick on and look good beside, a noncompetitor for Number One status. Mary gives Della an In-Crowd friend to simultaneously relieve and feed her sense of Not Fitting In. Not Fitting In isn’t a great self-image, but it’s better than no self-image at all. Better, that is, until they’re together in the one place where Della should be the one fitting in, and Mary is still showing her up. And picking. Picking and pecking away. But— The truth is that Mary is the outsider in Java. Incredulous of the spirit world and its “intimate connection” with the mundane sphere, she drags Della into a jungle where the barrier between planes is no sturdier than a thin veil of vines, and now Della has the advantage. At least she’s imbibed Mbak Susi’s tales of Jagad Lelembut and been told she need not be afraid. Mbak Susi assured her: The spirit world isn’t evil. It just knows how to bring out the wickedness in you. And at this point, Della’s primed to be wicked. Wicked enough to push Mary back, off the path and down a long drop. Problem. Jagad Lelembut hosts many spirits. Wronged ghosts, maybe, like the figure of Mary that floats through the trees, head too big, eyes out of place. Ancestral forces that take on the shapes of a police outpost and a policeman who knows what Della has done and who gets her to sign… what? Not a missing-person report but a confession? An acceptance of the terms of kutukan, curse? It’s harsh, but maybe the locals are right in their contention that the “two young American women” were done in not by mundane predators, animal or human, but by the curse of “profound unbelonging in a land that did not spend its fleeting energy trying to forgive.” Next week, we kick off our new longread with Chapters 1-3 of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.[end-mark] The post A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go” appeared first on Reactor.

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.