The Coronating: Stunning Imagery and Excellent Performances in Fantasy Driven by Crisis of Faith

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. 

A chamber film, the plot is designed with flashbacks that take the film from mental turmoil to physical danger to loss, intertwining the lives of the new king (Ian Sawan), his sibling and guardsman, Knight (Onyx Simpson), and Knight’s personal demon, Daitya (Mari Kasuya). With only minutes to go before the new king is coronated, Knight must accept the undeniable: the king is corrupt, however dear he may be to them. As family and duty find themselves in opposition, Daitya creeps in, all sharp nails to tender wounds. 

Daitya, literally meaning demon, gets to play the more dramatic of the two roles and she delivers with panache, her charm both enchanting and terrifying. Simpson imbues the conflict of their stoic knight role with the history of the orphaned child who grew up with the burden of love and gratitude. That burden now stays Knight’s hand, paralysed into tortured inaction despite knowing the truth. The score is restrained. A tense humming sticks to the narrative exactly like Knight’s unassailable turmoil, which, stirred by Daitya, gives them no room for respite. 

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. Fruit, art, costume—even a candle’s flame is utterly, dramatically beautiful. 

Despite the excellence of the construction, the writing underneath can feel somewhat underwhelming. Perhaps it is that Knight’s stoicism is given greater emphasis than revealing expression, shifting the character into a kind of opacity that becomes wearying in a narrative that is heavily reliant on (re)telling while running upwards of twenty minutes. By extension, Simpson and Kasuya’s performances, though precise, are compromised into a degree of inertness because their characters affect each other just short of sufficient. 

The final moments of the film press you to think as chilling revelations trigger a conclusive crisis of everything Knight believes in and stands for. Daitya’s lulling tune becomes the false balm for wounds that have by now festered and can only be ignored until Knight succumbs to them. 

Watch The Coronating Short Film