In “The Uprising,” a new film from the British director and screenwriter Paul Greengrass, we never learn the protagonist’s name. He is a poor country farmer, mired in the feudal miseries of fourteenth-century England. We first encounter him in a state of mud-caked, mad-eyed exhaustion, working a wretched plot of land that, for some time now, has yielded nothing in response to his labors. Some distance away are the grave markers of his wife and children, victims of the Black Death. All who know this man simply call him Ploughman: “I am what I do,” he explains. He might just as well be called Everyman; there is nothing unique about his experience of loss, poverty, and deep, implacable fury, which soon bubbles over into violence. It is 1381, and the plague has wiped out half of England and sent the remaining half into socioeconomic ruin. Richard II (Woody Norman), a feckless fourteen-year-old, sits on the throne, and his manipulative councillors—intent on refilling the royal coffers, which have been depleted by a long and costly war with France—have chosen to raise taxes not on the Church or the merchant class, who have too much leveraging power, but on the peasants, who have none. Or so the councillors think.

Here it is worth noting that Ploughman is played by Andrew Garfield, whose earlier characters—they include the playwright Jonathan Larson, the Second World War veteran Desmond Doss, and, of course, Spider-Man—have seldom cloaked themselves in such lowly anonymity. Garfield will next be seen as the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman, in “Artificial,” a film that does not, to judge by advance word, smile warmly on the billionaire tech-bro class. “The Uprising,” although set at least six hundred years before the digital age, takes its own dim view of the obscenely wealthy powers that be. By turns dour and vigorous, Greengrass’s film dramatizes the Peasants’ Revolt, which will see Ploughman band together with thousands of other men like him and, turning their scythes and sickles into weapons of war, march in fiery protest toward London. There, they intend to petition Richard II to reduce taxes, improve wages, and abolish the serfdom that binds so many of them to their lords’ increasingly fruitless lands.

Garfield, his movie-star magnetism largely undimmed by his matted hair, bony frame, and grimy rags, is well suited to his character’s sturdily familiar arc. Ploughman is a plainspoken man of the people, a reluctant hero in the making, and his seeming scrawniness belies his considerable strength. He has an aptitude for violence, and so does Greengrass, whose rough-and-ready handheld camera (wielded here by the director of photography Pål Ulvik Rokseth) responds to the sight of blood with the kind of exultant frenzy that brings a shark to mind. When Ploughman fatally beats one of the soldiers who have come to tax his village into oblivion, the images jostle and quake with the kind of furiously controlled chaos that has long been Greengrass’s stylistic signature.

Yet Ploughman also knows his place, and once he joins the rebellion he is mostly reserved, watchful, and content to let others make the decisions. In time, though, his own emerging talents as a speaker and strategist bring him into the inner circle of the movement’s principal leader, Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a levelheaded man and an Army veteran. The most fascinating aspect of “The Uprising” is the light that it shines on the logistics of armed revolt, especially once the rebels arrive in London and arrange an audience with the King on the banks of the Thames. We witness the internal debates and negotiations among the rebel leaders, who seldom agree on best tactics; we are also made privy to the schemes of the councillors, desperate to insure that Richard, who has an unpredictable streak, remains putty in their hands. Whether or not the monarch will even hear out the peasants’ petition becomes its own source of suspense, amplified by the fact that the rebels, for all their sound and fury, drop quietly and reflexively to their knees whenever Richard’s crowned head pops into view. They truly do believe that God has empowered this young man to rule on his behalf.

The rebels have their own self-appointed religious authority, though, in the figure of John Ball (a fierce Jamie Bell), Tyler’s radicalized second-in-command. Ball is a priest who has been branded a heretic, and he clings to a grimly Old Testament belief that justice must be exacted in carnage. In time, the King hears the peasants out and agrees to their demands, including the painstaking drafting of charters, one for each county, that will inscribe the end of serfdom into law. (One of the film’s more memorable characters is a lowly scribe—played by Sky Yang—whose conduct proves as admirable as his calligraphy.) But the promise of a more prosperous future is not enough for Ball, who demands that the King’s councillors—they include Sir Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), the treasurer, and Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Stephen Dillane)—be put to death as traitors. His desire for retribution is shared by a rebel named Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), who serves to remind Ploughman that, however universal their rage, everyone has their own intensely personal reasons for joining the fight.

Ball will have his vengeance, for better and for worse. Axes fall and heads roll, but, despite the mob’s ecstatic, bloodthirsty cries, the underlying mood is far from triumphant. Greengrass does not press his moral argument as pointedly as Christopher Nolan did in “The Odyssey,” which, in restaging the fall of Troy, also wrung its hands over a long and dreadfully hypnotic spectacle of mass slaughter. But the intended takeaway here is no less forceful or stern. The film doesn’t mourn the deaths of Richard II’s councillors, much less dispute that they have earned their gory ends. But it suggests that the rebels, in giving themselves over to bloodlust, have set themselves up for a fate of similar brutality.

You might say that “The Uprising” amounts to something of a homecoming for Greengrass; not since his least typical movie, the romantic comedy “The Theory of Flight” (1998), has he set a movie on English soil. Beyond the restless, globe-trotting antics of Jason Bourne, he has tended to turn his camera on ordinary, real-life American heroes: the brave passengers who brought down a hijacked plane, in “United 93” (2006); a veteran seaman whose ship is beset by Somali pirates, in “Captain Phillips” (2013); and, most recently, a down-on-his-luck driver trying to save twenty-two children from a disastrous wildfire, in “The Lost Bus” (2025). “The Uprising,” in the oppressively grim, red-spattered grayness of its visual palette and the clarity with which it toggles between the rebels and their oppressors, sometimes reminded me of “Bloody Sunday” (2002), Greengrass’s powerful re-creation of a deadly 1972 clash between British forces and Northern Irish civil-rights protesters.

Yet it’s not an entirely flattering comparison. In his best films, including “Bloody Sunday,” the director’s convulsive visual technique arises naturally, and forcefully, from the material; his raggedy methods achieve a kind of conceptual seamlessness, and history really does feel as if it’s being forged on the fly. In “The Uprising,” those telltale tricks feel more incongruous, more scattershot and superficially applied, as if Greengrass were trying to juice an otherwise straightforward period piece with an extra layer of realist-action immediacy. The camera never seems to discover anything spontaneously: every movement and formation, and every revealing glance and expression—particularly those of Richard’s mother (Katherine Waterston), forever on the lookout for her son’s welfare—appears to have been painstakingly composed in advance. The camera’s gaze itself veers inconsistently between on-the-ground urgency and drone-shot stateliness; at times, the placid images of the streets and buildings of London, buckling under the force of the peasants’ onslaught, yank us out of the movie’s meticulously constructed maelstrom.

None of which is to deny that “The Uprising,” though seldom in mastery of its material, nonetheless holds us, however intermittently, in its sweaty grip. It derives its resonance, unsurprisingly, from events unfolding beyond the frame. It hardly seems lost on the filmmakers that this quintessentially English spectacle might have particular resonance for an American audience—an audience that, if recent democratic-socialist winds are to be trusted, is impatient for sweeping political and economic change. (Garfield, at pains to emphasize the movie’s relevance and rage, said in a recent interview that he hoped any billionaires who saw it would be “scared shitless.”)

Yet, in seeking to harness the righteous anger of the have-nots, Greengrass’s film has already stumbled out of the gates. To reiterate the question hinted at from the start: Who is this Ploughman, exactly? Late last month, the movie’s American distributor, Focus Features, confused the issue by releasing a trailer that billed the film as “The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood,” effectively recasting it as an origin story for the most famous and cinematically overexposed of English outlaws. In a rare and amusing case of one marketing hand apparently not knowing what the other is doing, the film’s U.K. distributor, Entertainment Film Distributors, denied that the story had anything to do with Robin Hood—a legend that, of course, hails from the time of King Richard the Lionheart, who ruled almost two centuries before Richard II.

Did the recent critical and commercial failure of “The Death of Robin Hood,” an anemic piece of revisionism, spur this apparent confusion? I have no idea, though it may be worth noting that, when it was first announced in 2022, Greengrass’s project bore the title “The Hood.” As for the finished film, it sports (spoiler alert!) a bracing one-year-later coda, which finds our Ploughman stepping into what certainly looks like proto-Robin Hood trappings: masked and camouflaged in filthy green rags, and backed by a ragtag army of archers. Whatever Greengrass’s flaws as a spinner of historical tales, an uncertainty about exactly what story he’s telling has never been one of them—until now. Does the conceptual muddle of “The Uprising” also account for its visual imprecisions, its wobbly command of its own material? Perhaps so: a movie that yearns to have us baying for blood is instead more apt to leave us scratching our heads. ♦