The Coronating

The scouts

A 22-minute chamber drama about regicide-adjacent moral collapse dressed in fantasy drag—competent, but it's playing the game everyone expects dark fantasy to play, and I'm not sure what it's arguing against.

Solaiman and King understand that coronation scenes are built on ritual and constraint; watching them compress a succession crisis into a single room, with Onyx Simpson's Knight anchoring the tension between duty and knowledge, sits perfectly in the lineage of intimate power plays—Macbeth scaled down to the moment before the blade falls.

Mari Kasuya's Daitya—present as Knight's personal demon, half-memory half-threat—is the film's secret architecture; it's a single casting choice that transforms what could've been a straightforward fratricide setup into something about internal collapse, and Simpson's reactions to an actor who might not even be there do all the work.

Reviews

Justin Solaiman and Hudson King's The Coronating is a gorgeously visualised 22-minute fantasy drama examining the conflict of a knight and sibling at the eleventh hour before the corrupt new king—their brother—is coronated. The production design is dazzlingly well crafted, as is the cinematography that capitalises on the colour scheme of the set to deliver a final image that telegraphs both medievality and grandeur.