Whatever I was feeling about this feminist historical drama about Henry VIII’s last wife Katherine Parr was knocked askew by the oddly contemporary credits.

They were all electric red and blue against a banger PJ Harvey soundtrack. Perhaps this is director Karim Aïnouz’s not so subtle messaging about the essentially contemporary nature of the story we’ve just seen.

I don’t usually like historically inaccurate retellings but there is something so knowing about this version. What it made me think about was how little we know about the women from history, particularly the ones that don’t have the big dramatic stories. Katherine Parr is the one that outlived Henry, she wasn’t beheaded, divorced or tragically died, breaking his heart. She was just fortunate enough to survive him.

And watching an initially unrecognisable Jude Law as Henry as he must’ve been – loathsomely entitled, verging on megalomania, overweight, the flesh of his leg slowly dying – we can imagine what the life of his wife would have been.

In this fable, we are shown Katherine as beautiful, mature (she was around 30 and twice married), accepting of her fate, forced to marry a man she doesn’t love because of course he is the king and more powerful than God. The messaging is perhaps subtle for hetero audiences but it seems clear that her true love was Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a gentle woman who has become a radical. And by radical we mean speaking on behalf of the people, suggesting that the Bible being in English is a good thing.

It’s not a safe time to have an opinion though, particularly if you’re a woman. There’s a lot of burning of people at the stake, particularly for heresy which seems to be speaking about anything that the King or the obsequious church leaders around him don’t agree with.

Alicia Vikander’s portrayal of Katherine is interesting. There is something about Vikander‘s face which is like a blank canvas, where her own personality never seems to take over the character she is playing. Not like Jude Law, although he is at first unrecognisable, is still very Jude Law when it comes down to it. The Vikander Katherine is stoic, but at heart a woman who wants to have a place in the world. When she is appointed Regent while Henry is off fighting in another country, she enjoys having her opinion listened to, being able to make decisions that people agree with, because what we are being shown here is the awful overwhelming oppression of misogyny. Where women not only don’t have a say, but there is a belief that there is something essentially awful about a woman with an opinion.

So it’s quite possible that any of these aspects of her story would be true. The reality is that none of them would’ve been written about by historians because the stories are all about the men. I kind of like the brevity of that, the message it sends about what our knowledge of history is and how in reality, if we gave these women some time and space, we would probably be surprised.

When I did some Wikipedia-ing afterwards, it seems like the major beats are true, although the timeline may not be so accurate. I couldn’t find any evidence that Katherine and Anne were friends. Interestingly, Katherine married Thomas Seymour (Sam Riley) very quickly after Henry’s death and unexpectedly became pregnant at 35 but then died in childbirth less than two years after Henry. The fate of women.