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You gotta love it when an adaptation of a period piece in a European country that is not England winds up getting a very English makeover. Or not. A Promise is very much a headscratcher in this regard. Here’s a story that explicitly takes place in Germany pre-WWI but is cast from top to bottom with British talent not even bothering with attempting an accent. It’s like when ancient Greece is uniformly white and populated by posh accents – something is curiously hilarious about it all.
Does this sound like nitpicking? Perhaps, but nothing much in A Promise works as it should, so my mind may have wondered a bit. You see, A Promise is basically a will they/won’t they romance wrapped up in fidgety, mannered indifference and dispassionate verbal exchanges that never sells its central conceit.
There’s the young buck (Richard Madden, handsome but bored) hired to tutor the young son of his older boss (Alan Rickman, doing his default seething) and gob smacked when he meets the boss’ younger wife (Rebecca Hall, the only lead finding the right balance in her performance). Attraction slow burns and is blown out by a variety of sources – the boss’ machinations, the outbreak of the Great War, a sense of propriety and honor. A Promise finds its title in the exchange of love and fidelity that the young buck and younger wife give each other as he’s shipped off away from Germany and eventually stranded with no lines of communication.
If you’re wondering if they’ll eventually wind up together, then you’ve clearly never seen a movie of this type before. There’s also some underdeveloped bits of social commentary and a general sense of turgid pacing that makes everything feel diluted and dull, frankly. The talent assembled for this is mighty, but it all is in service of a misguided vision that never quite squares where it wants to go or what it wants to be.
