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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchStephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul is a warm, well-acted film about a real friendship between Queen Victoria and a young Indian clerk. Its problem is less the friendship than the frame around it. The film treats an unequal imperial relationship as a personal story of understanding, and it gives the British Empire mostly the role of backdrop. That is the core of the critique that the film is tone-deaf to colonialism, and it is a fair argument, provided it is kept separate from the question of whether the bond existed.
The film at a glance
- Release and rating: Focus Features lists the drama as released on September 22, 2017, rated PG-13, with a running time of 1 hour 52 minutes.
- Cast and direction: Judi Dench plays Victoria, Ali Fazal plays Abdul Karim, and Stephen Frears directs.
- Writing credits: Lee Hall and Shrabani Basu are named as writers.
- Source: The film is based on Basu’s book Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant.
The studio’s official synopsis sets up the premise: “When Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), a young clerk, travels from India to participate in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, he is surprised to find favor with the Queen herself.” Everything that follows in the film grows from that encounter, which is why the question of framing matters so much.
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Victoria & Abdul [Blu-ray] | $2.49 | Buy on Amazon |
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Victoria & Abdul (BD + digital download) [Blu-ray] [2017] | $15.82 | Buy on Amazon |
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Victoria & Abdul [Blu-ray] | $6.76 | Buy on Amazon |
What the film is built on
In a 2017 interview with TIME, Basu described researching household papers and the surviving volumes of Victoria’s Urdu journals. The film is a dramatization built from that work. It is not a transparent or complete historical record, and the reporting that accompanied its release makes the gaps clear:
- Letters were destroyed after Victoria’s death, according to TIME.
- References to Karim were edited out of Victoria’s journals.
- Karim’s own diaries were initially believed lost, until his family produced them.
- Basu also put the period over which Victoria learned Urdu at 13 years, as TIME reported in 2017.
These limits cut in two directions. They mean the film cannot be checked scene by scene against a full archive. They also mean that the surviving record is uneven, with the most documented voice being the Queen’s and the most controlled being the court’s. A critic can fairly ask which voices the film had to work with, and which it chose to foreground.
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#1 Best Overall
The colonialism critique
The sharpest published criticism comes from Simran Hans in her Observer review. Hans describes Abdul as thinly drawn and argues that the film takes pains to make Victoria look better than her position allows. Her line is that the film “takes great pains to absolve Victoria of colonial responsibility, painting her, bizarrely, as tolerant and reviled for it.”
Hans goes further, concluding that the film’s revisionism “is a stretch that, at best, works as a cute royalist fantasy and, at worst, dresses up its endorsement of colonialism and empire as something progressive.” This is a critical judgment by a named reviewer, and it should be presented as her argument rather than as settled history.
Absolution through tolerance
The central move Hans identifies is that personal open-mindedness stands in for political accountability. A monarch who learns a language, takes an interest in a servant’s family, and seems to see the world anew can read as admirable on screen. The critique asks whether that warmth is allowed to answer for the system Victoria presided over, and whether the film’s sympathy for her quietly closes the question.
Rank #2
- The disk has English audio.
The thinly drawn Abdul
The second charge concerns Abdul himself. If he exists mainly to draw out Victoria’s emotional growth, the film has made the colonial subject into a catalyst. That is a different failure from inaccuracy. A film can get the friendship right and still under-develop the person on the other side of it.
Studio framing against the critique
Focus Features’ promotional framing is markedly different from Hans’s reading. The distributor emphasizes a transcendent friendship across race, religion, gender and class, and says Victoria sees a changing world through new eyes. That is a studio’s account of the film’s meaning, not independent evidence about the history, and a review should treat it as one more claim to test.
Basu’s own position complicates the picture. In her TIME interview she said, “I am the last person to like Raj nostalgia. I can’t stand the stuff.” She also said, “This was a story [the British] were trying to erase.” Her view runs against readings of the film as Raj nostalgia, but she is the author of the source book and a participant in the film’s story, not a neutral judge of every historical question.
Rank #3
A framework for judging the film
Four questions separate a fair reading from a slogan. The table below applies them to the film, with the evidence available for each.
| Question | What to look for in the film | What the sources establish |
|---|---|---|
| How directly does it treat empire and colonial power? | Whether British rule appears as a system with consequences, or only as the setting for the court. | Hans argues the film puts empire in the background and absolves Victoria. The studio frames the story as a friendship across difference. |
| How much agency and interiority does Abdul have? | Whether he has interests, decisions and goals outside Victoria’s emotional arc. | Hans calls the character thinly drawn. Karim’s own diaries, produced by his family after being thought lost, are a source for his perspective. |
| Does it separate documented evidence from dramatization? | Whether the film signals what is recorded and what is imagined. | The film is a dramatization built from Basu’s research. Letters were destroyed and references to Karim were edited out of the journals, so the record is incomplete. |
| Does emotional intimacy replace political context? | Whether the warmth of the relationship is allowed to stand in for an account of power. | This is Hans’s central objection. The studio’s promotional frame emphasizes friendship and changing perspective, not the imperial structure. |
Where the review lands
The film earns credit for its performances and for an emotional premise that rests on a relationship the surviving evidence supports as real. The strongest criticism does not depend on inventing the friendship. It depends on the film’s framing: it places a colonial encounter inside a royal confidence and asks the audience to feel the warmth of that confidence without asking the empire to answer for the terms on which it took place. In that sense, Hans’s charge that the film is tone-deaf to colonialism is best read as a judgment about emphasis and character, and it is a judgment a reader can test against the film itself.
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Reading and watching further
- The source book: Basu’s Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant gives more historical background than the film does. It is the source for the adaptation, not a guarantee that the film is fully accurate.
- Where to watch: Focus Features’ official page links to a “Watch at Home” destination, but it does not name a streaming service, region or price. Check current availability in your country before renting or subscribing.
Read the film alongside the surviving record, and treat both the studio’s promotion and Hans’s review as arguments rather than facts. That approach gives the friendship its due while keeping the empire in view.
Quick Recap
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