Mr. Pip

Mr. Pip (2012) is a war drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Andrew Adamson and based on Lloyd Jones's novel of the same name. Set on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea during the civil conflict of the 1990s, the film follows a young girl named Matilda (Xzannjah Matsi) as the last white man in her village — Mr. Watts, played by Hugh Laurie — opens a makeshift school and begins reading Great Expectations aloud to the children.

Dickens's Pip becomes more vivid to Matilda than the soldiers moving through her world. When those soldiers demand to know who this Pip is, the protective power of storytelling turns suddenly dangerous. Kerry Fox co-stars. At 133 minutes the film holds nothing back about what the war does to the village and the people in it.

Adamson directed the first two Narnia films but brings an entirely different register here — measured and unsparing. Laurie's Watts is not a savior figure; he is a man hiding something, who found in a Victorian novel the only thing that makes sense to him. Stream Mr. Pip (2012) online on iFILM.