Tudor King
1979 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A man who fantasises that he is a British king holds court in an abandoned house on a frozen prairie, where a schoolboy who wanders in after class is invited to meet the delusional, increasingly paranoid pretender.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A delusional prairie king holding court in an abandoned house sounds like it should be absurdist gold, but Kroeker plays it straight—melancholic, almost reverential toward the fantasy. It's the road not taken, and that restraint is exactly what makes it unnerving instead of clever.
Kroeker's 1979 sensibility—the frozen landscape as psychological space, the careful staging of delusion without mockery—sits in direct lineage with the Canadian experimental tradition; this is a film aware it's building something formal out of a single, sustained premise about perception and isolation.
The schoolboy's quiet acceptance of the king's paranoia, the way Kroeker lets the camera linger on the boy's face rather than cutting away, transforms what could be quirky-surreal into genuinely unsettling—one choice of restraint over reaction and the whole film becomes something else.