Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One

As fun as the broom rides, dragon fights and Quidditch matches have been, all along, the real magic at work in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series is the harrowing metamorphosis from child to adult. And my, how the heroes have grown in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, the penultimate film in the series.

Now grim-faced young adults, Harry, Ron and Hermione wander a beautiful, bleak British wilderness awaiting their last reckoning with Lord Voldemort.

Gone are the cozy comforts of Hogwarts School — its benevolent headmaster, Dumbledore, is dead and buried. Instead, Harry the Chosen One (Daniel Radcliffe) and his stalwart best friends, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), now grim-faced young adults, wander a beautiful, bleak British wilderness awaiting their last reckoning with the serpent-faced Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, as sleekly evil as ever).

More a mood piece than an action movie, though there are plenty of genuinely scary thrills, Deathly Hallows is brought to life by director David Yates with a lush, smouldering confidence. Dividing Rowling’s sprawling, 700-plus-page book into two —the final film instalment is due next summer — may have been inspired as much by Hollywood greed as narrative necessity, but the result is visually sumptuous and emotionally resonant.

Opening with the Ministry of Magic on the brink of collapse, Voldemort’s emboldened Death Eaters commit terror attacks on wizards and muggles alike. In the hope of keeping Harry alive, his comrades in the Order of the Phoenix engineer a daring retreat to a safe house, with seven of them disguised as decoy Harrys to throw off the scent of the boy wizard’s magical "trace." He barely escapes, the Order is scattered, and soon after, the government is reduced to a propaganda machine designed to discredit and ultimately eradicate "mudbloods" — witches and wizards of human origin.

In the books, Rowling draws heavily from Second World War and Holocaust imagery. Yates and cinematographer Eduardo Serra layer in references to the dystopian worlds of 1984 and The Road. These are the darkest of dark days: misinformation abounds, gangs of thugs scour the streets and countryside for Potter sympathizers, and Voldemort’s followers torture and murder innocents with gleeful impunity.

As always, an honour roll of veteran British talent is on hand to support the main cast. This time out, the embarrassment of witches includes regulars Helena Bonham Carter as the sadistic Bellatrix Lestrange and Alan Rickman as the possibly treacherous Severus Snape, alongside Imelda Staunton, Robbie Coltrane, David Thewlis, Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans. The performances by Radcliffe, Grint and Watson feel richer for their having been watched transform into adults over the last 10 years. (It’s gratifying to see that in real life, these actors have become gracious, funny, unspoiled twentysomethings — unlikely to lose track of their panties or get arrested for snorting cocaine off a stripper.)

The three best friends set off to search for horcruxes — the talismans into which Voldemort has secreted bits of his soul. For Harry, Ron and Hermione, everyone they love is either dead or gone underground — they have no one to rely on but each other. Overcome by their predicament, tensions fester and eventually explode. While Harry has been the boy wonder from the start, this instalment in the series is as much Hermione and Ron’s story as his. Grint gets to show off Ron’s simmering resentment, while Hermione has matured into a resourceful, courageous heroine.

In one of the film’s most moving set pieces, Ron deserts his friends in a fit of rage. To console the heartbroken Hermione, Harry leads her in a goofy dance, while Nick Cave’s haunting O Children crackles in the background on a transistor radio. It’s one of the few scenes in the slavishly faithful film series not written by Rowling herself, and yet it feels deeply authentic. No longer kids, but not quite adults, the pair share a moment of not-entirely-platonic connection that captures the entirety of their shared history, as well as all the future and potential that’s at stake in their impending showdown with Voldemort.  

At this point, Yates and longtime screenwriter Steve Kloves have earned the divergence from the source material. Another assured cinematic flourish includes the recounting of the wizard legend The Deathly Hallows, told through an elegantly creepy animated sequence of shadow puppets. While each film has been increasingly dark and challenging, this is the first one that fully transcends the kiddie-movie label. If only more adult films were crafted with as much heart.

This, of course, is just the set-up for the final chapter. In its aching, anxious meandering, the movie feels a lot like the way station of late adolescence: a time when nothing much and absolutely everything happens.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One opens on Nov. 18.

Rachel Giese is a writer based in Toronto.