Synopsis
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) is Vincent Ward's fantasy, free to watch online on iFILM. Cumberland, 1348, and the Black Death is creeping across England toward a remote mining village that has so far been spared.
Rescue arrives in the dreams of nine-year-old Griffin: a lake with a coffin drifting on it, a white church topped by an iron cross, a torch falling forever down a black shaft. The boy and his older brother read it as prophecy. Dig a tunnel clean through the earth, they decide, and plant a cross on the spire of a great cathedral as an offering to spare them. A handful of miners climb into the pit with their torches and come out the other side, into the neon, traffic, and roaring machines of 1980s New Zealand, a present their medieval minds have no words for.
Ward shoots the medieval scenes in stark black and white and the modern world in color, and the jolt between them hits harder than any effect. This is less a ride than a parable about faith and the fear of dying, a cult favorite that wider audiences have mostly forgotten. It's for viewers who like strange, searching cinema that withholds easy answers. Stream The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) online on iFILM.
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