– Tomasz Mielnik’s sophomore feature transforms the medieval Pope Gregory legend into a deadpan mock-epic of sin and destiny, in a minimalist yet mannerist auteur comedy
Jan František Uher in Gregorius, the Chosen One
Polish-born, Czech-based filmmaker Tomasz Mielnik world-premiered his sophomore feature, Gregorius, the Chosen One, in the Special Screenings section of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Inspired by Thomas Mann‘s novel The Holy Sinner – itself based on the medieval legend of Pope Gregory – the film sees Mielnik return to the playful, anti-epic mode of his road-movie debut, Journey to Rome. Rather than treating the material as a sombre religious parable, he recasts it as a knowingly artificial comic fable about a child born of incest, and his unlikely path to the papal throne.
Mielnik opens with a travelling thespian (Miroslav Donutil) performing a puppet-theatre tale for villagers and their children in a medieval settlement. Bored with conventional stories, the peasants demand the strange tale of Pope Gregory. The performer uses marionettes to re-enact the protagonist’s taboo origins in a deliberately child-friendly manner. “Kids don’t understand,” he replies when one villager objects. The scene establishes the film’s governing mode: irreverent, theatrical and alert to the absurdity embedded in its source material.
The film then introduces Gregory (Jan František Uher), who has been adopted by a fishing family and sent to study Latin in a monastery. Bored by lessons with the monk, he instead dreams of knights and the liberation of the Holy Land. After meeting an actual knight (Martin Dejdar), Gregory sets off in pursuit of adventure, bidding farewell to his adoptive family and especially to his stepbrother Red (Petr Uhlík). His journey takes him through a string of unlikely episodes: pirates, unexpected kingship, fatherhood and, eventually, seventeen years tied to a rock before destiny guides him towards the papacy.
Gregorius, the Chosen One is part absurdist medieval fable, part playful road movie, with Gregory travelling on horseback and repeatedly lingering at each stage of his journey far longer than expected. Uher plays the title character with deadpan solemnity and ornate speech, mining much of the humour from the contrast between Gregory’s heroic self-conception and the ridiculousness of his circumstances. Mielnik supplements this with the kind of visual gags and comic incongruities already present in Journey to Rome.
Despite its medieval setting, the film is deliberately minimalist – a quality that appears to stem partly from budgetary constraints, but which becomes central to its aesthetic. The inserted puppet-theatre passages are not merely decorative: they frame the film as an act of storytelling, while allowing Mielnik to compress or stylise episodes that would otherwise demand a much larger production scale. Rather than disguising its modest means, the film turns them into part of its theatrical strategy.
Although the source material is steeped in sin, guilt and redemption, Mielnik avoids a solemn morality-play treatment. His version takes the route of a playful, adventurous fable, its optimism consistently undercut by irony. Gregory’s ascent is never treated as grand spiritual destiny in the conventional sense. Rather, Mielnik turns the archetypal journey towards greatness into a comic mechanism, driven by accident, misunderstanding and exaggerated narrative convention. As in his debut, he weaves together pastiche and parody, transforming taboo-laden medieval material into absurdist comedy.
Mielnik’s sophomore feature extends his highly stylised approach to cinema, built on irony, theatricality, sight gags and narrative subversion. Rather than a grand historical or religious fresco, Gregorius, the Chosen One offers an ironic retelling of archetypal material in a mannered yet minimalist style. Its artificiality and deadpan humour may limit its appeal beyond festival audiences receptive to absurdist Central European auteur comedy, but its distinctiveness lies in the way it turns limitation into form, transforming a medieval legend of sin and redemption into a playful anti-epic about fate, storytelling and the absurd machinery of greatness.
Gregorius, the Chosen One was produced by Background Films and co-produced by Mozaika Films, deFilm and Magic Lab. Artcam Films will handle the local theatre release on 10 December.
