On the desert frontiers of an unnamed empire, Mark Rylance plays The Magistrate, a careful administrator whose steady governance has kept the outpost at peace for years. That balance is upended by the arrival of Johnny Depp as Colonel Joll, an officer from the empire’s center who pursues a ruthless, procedural path to the “truth.” Joll’s approach is brutal and unyielding, and the Magistrate struggles to understand his methods, his goals, or the purpose behind such force.
Colonel Joll insists on interrogating an innocent man and his nephew for sheep rustling, using brutal torture to extract confessions. The Magistrate cannot grasp Joll’s aims or how far his methods will go, and he watches as Joll forces the tortured nephew to escort him and a detachment to his tribe, where numerous women and elderly men are taken into custody as “prisoners of war.” The next day, Joll departs, leaving the Magistrate to grapple with the consequences of a regime that values expedience over mercy.
A few months later, a former prisoner with two broken ankles is seen panhandling in the streets. The Magistrate offers her food and shelter and tries to help her heal, learning through her experience the depth of the suffering inflicted by the campaign. The girl, Gana Bayarsaikhan, has endured much, including the death of her father, and the act of kindness is misread by some soldiers as a sign of lust or a plan to keep her as a concubine. The Magistrate earnestly promises to return her to her people if she wishes to go, and she ultimately chooses to return to her own.
After a long desert journey, the Magistrate seeks to restore relations with the nomads in the mountains, but they are wary and upset. Still, the Magistrate’s reputation, along with the knowledge that he helped one of their own, keeps the tribesmen from slaughtering him and his escorts. He returns to find Officer Mandel, a new commanding presence at the fort, and Mandel immediately clamps down, accusing the Magistrate of treachery and stripping him of his office. David Dencik as Mandel brings a harsh, corrective force to the garrison, reshaping the town’s dynamics in a harsh new light.
The Magistrate is eventually released, but when he attempts to aid prisoners of war being mistreated by Mandel’s soldiers, he is beaten and humiliated. He is then brought in for questioning and accused of consorting with the enemy for helping the nomad girl. Publicly shamed and stripped of his home and possessions, the Magistrate is left to wander the streets as Colonel Joll departs with a large force to wipe out the mountain nomads.
Yet the campaign’s aftermath binds the nomadic tribes into a single, expansive threat. The fort receives a stark reminder when a horse bearing the mutilated corpse of one of Joll’s men rides in, and Mandel leads some of his men away. Those left behind surge to flee, looting, raping, and murdering the town’s people in the ensuing chaos. The Magistrate, now disheveled and destitute, is taken in by a former servant who offers food and shelter, a rare beacon of mercy in a brutal landscape.
Joll’s military drive has flourished in its own way, consolidating the dispersed nomads into a unified, barbarian army. The town reels as the campaign’s shadow stretches across the desert, and the narrative returns to the stark image of power and consequence: a horseman’s return, a town in ruin, and a once-principled official now forced to confront a horizon crowded with the inevitability of war.
In the final moment, the Magistrate wanders through a quiet street where boys pretend to stand guard beside scarecrows dressed as soldiers at the fort’s gates. He thinks of the nomad girl, far in the desert, as a shadow falls over the courtyard and a cloud of dust rises on the horizon—announcing the approach of a vast army of nomadic warriors heading toward the town.
