Metacritic reviews

The metaphors are a bit too numerous and on the nose at times, but Rylance’s unbelievable performance overshadows the minor downfalls.

Despite the on-the-nose delivery of its messaging being intentional, Coetzee’s script will surely alienate some viewers. The slow pacing won’t do it any favors either, considering it promises weightier drama than that heightened, moralizing tone could ever provide.

Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.

Depp could be dismissed as just a name and a costume who got the film financed, but his Franco-Teutonic take on Joll never quite crosses into caricature. It’s good to see him putting in the effort. Pattinson? His tiny part basically is just a name and a costume who got the film financed.

It’s easy to read the film as a not particularly subtle metaphor for fascism or “the war on terror”, and its black hats aren’t so much characters as automatons.

The critique of those in power and their need to put down others — preferably foreign or different-looking people — in order to stay on top is as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. But like its noncommittal production design, which combines various North African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences for the locals and locales, the critique itself remains finally quite dull and dispersed because it's so broad and unspecific.

Coetzee’s novel, with its measured, interiorized voice and sparse, incrementally devastating narrative, was never an obvious fit for film treatment. After a stiffly mannered, overwritten first act, however, Waiting for the Barbarians gradually gains in poetry and power, while Mark Rylance’s lead performance, as a liberal-minded colonial official undermined and overwhelmed by his tyrannical superiors, gives proceedings a quiet but firm moral core.

It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.

The film is deadly slow and uneventful, with brilliant scenes bursting to life, here and there, like roses in a wasteland.

Despite meticulous visuals and a strong central performance by Mark Rylance, the film feels dramatically ponderous and emotionally inert.