WILLIAM TELL (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

William Tell, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2025

Everyone knows one thing about William Tell, the Swiss folk hero, and William Tell, writer/director Nick Hamm's adaptation of the myth by way of a 19th-century play by Friedrich Schiller, opens with our hero preparing to take his famous shot. The scene doesn't play out fully during this flash-forward prologue, but when the movie finally arrives at it properly, we almost wonder if Hamm shouldn't have gotten it out of the way from the beginning.

The scene of Tell's legendary marksmanship marks the turning point of the story, the character, and, in this telling, the history of Austria's rule over Switzerland during the Middle Ages. We all know the basic setup of the event, in which Tell must prove his skill with a crossbow by shooting an apple from the top of his son's head.

People who don't know the origin of Tell as a folk figure or even that he was Swiss are likely aware of this tale, so to have it teased once and played out again as a sequence of much intended tension kind of suggests how shallow the story surrounding the moment is. It's akin to a cover band playing their inspiration's biggest hit twice during a gig filled with songs that nobody knows or cares about much.

We should care about Tell's story, though, in a movie that's entirely about it, but Hamm's screenplay makes the character into a bland figure, who wants nothing to do with politics or battle any longer but finds those ugly matters thrust upon him. The whole narrative here becomes as predictable as Tell's apple-shooting—not because it's based on legend and history, but because everything within it is as simplistic and familiar as that description of the hero.

The man is played by Claes Bang, a charismatic actor who puts on a brave face to match how one-note his legendary character is. His Tell, whom everyone—including his beloved wife Suna (Golshifteh Farahani), who should probably have a bit more familiarity with her husband, since they do have a young-adult-looking "child" together—refers to by his surname, is a humble hunter at the story's start. While teaching his son Walter (Tobias Jowett) to hunt in the early 1300s, the pair learn of a local farmer (played by Sam Kelley) whose wife was raped and murdered by an Austrian tax collector and who took his gruesome vengeance upon the official.

Tell helps the farmer escape by boat in a terrible storm, and as he evades Austrian soldiers led by Gessler (Connor Swindells) hunting for the killer, he also learns that some Swiss nobles, like his old friend Stauffacher (Rafe Spall), want to stay in good favor with Austrian king Albert (Ben Kingsley), while others, such as the friend's wife Gertrude (Emily Beecham), want rebellion. Tell, it seems, is just waiting around to see which way things go and to hope that none of this mess winds up at his door.

It does, of course, when Gessler detains Tell for failing to knell to an Austrian helmet, grabs Walter for standing up for his father, and arranges that display of Tell's skill with a crossbow to stop the execution of his family. Hamm does attempt to elicit tension from a scene that's as known throughout the world as any piece of storytelling, but all that does here is to emphasize just how by-the-book the plotting is, how underdeveloped the characters are, and how much stake the filmmaker has placed in so many characters except his protagonist.

Indeed, Tell doesn't really play much of a role in this story once the political machinations and intrigues in various palaces emerge. There's about as much focus, for example, on Rudenz (Jonah Hauer-King), the nephew of a powerful by ailing Swiss noble (played by Jonathan Pryce), who aligns himself with Austria in the hopes of having a chance to officially court the king's niece Bertha (Ellie Bamber), who is Swiss on her late mother's side and detests the cruel treatment of her half-kinsfolk. The episode with the apple on Walter's head, obviously, leads everyone, including Tell, to choose to fight against Albert's occupation.

From there, Tell really doesn't matter any more or less than any other character in this tale, which might have been an intriguing angle to approach a revolutionary narrative—if only that was an intentional concept on Hamm's part. Instead, it only further shows how little concern the movie has for its protagonist, who has his own adventures after the apple incident, gives an extended rallying speech that's only rousing in sudden shifts in vocal volume, and fights in a bloody battle that turns out to be doubly anticlimactic—firstly on account that news traveled slowly in medieval times and secondly because the whole narrative arrives at some setup for a sequel.

To be sure, the movie looks authentic in its period details, and Hamm's adaptation of the play seems to retain some flourish of early modern English in its dialogue, which makes the characters sound more interesting than they actually are. William Tell possesses the general feel of an epic story but little specific to make it so.

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