Tolkien

Tolkien (2019) is Dome Karukoski's biographical drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Nicholas Hoult plays the young J.R.R. Tolkien years before a single page was published — an orphan already obsessed with languages, myths and invented worlds.

What he lacks in family he finds in a tight circle of three schoolmates: four boys who argue about art, read each other their poems and swear they'll change the world. Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) steps into the life of the future philologist as the woman who would become his wife and an echo of the heroines he later imagined. Then the trenches of the First World War arrive, and the fellowship forged in classrooms is scattered across the mud of the Somme.

The film traces a line from Tolkien's early grief and friendships to the imagery that would surface in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, though the books themselves stay offscreen. Colm Meaney and Derek Jacobi round out the cast, the latter as a mentor in linguistics. It's a quiet, small-scale portrait, made for anyone curious about the man before the legend. Stream Tolkien (2019) online on iFILM.