Title: THE LAST CROWN: THE AUTUMN OF ALEXANDER OBRENOVIĆ
Logline: In the court of a crumbling kingdom, a young, isolated king and his controversial queen fight to modernize Serbia against a tide of political conspiracy, familial betrayal, and rabid nationalism, leading to a brutal and pivotal night that would change the course of European history.
Screenplay By: Joe Jukić
Directed By: Angelina Jolie
Principal Cast:
- Joe Jukić as King Alexander I Obrenović
- Milla Jovovich as Queen Draga Mašin
- Chris Kolić as Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević “Apis”
- (Supporting roles include) Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Former King Milan Obrenović, Stellan Skarsgård as Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, and Flora Thiemann as a young court maid, Lena, who serves as the audience’s eyes into the palace’s inner sanctum.
Treatment:
ACT I: THE HEIR & THE WIDOW
1889. The film opens in stark, cold austerity. King Milan, a cynical autocrat worn down by politics, abdicates in favor of his 13-year-old son, Alexander (Joe Jukić). The boy is crowned, ruling under a regency. We see Alexander as a sensitive, intelligent but deeply lonely youth, overshadowed by his father’s ghost and the manipulative scheming of politicians.
1893. In a bold, shocking move, 17-year-old Alexander stages a bloodless coup, dismissing the regents and declaring himself of age. He is initially celebrated as a daring, modern monarch. He dreams of a Westernized, prosperous Serbia, acting as a buffer between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. But his independence alienates his powerful, interfering father and the major political parties.
His personal life becomes his sanctuary and, ultimately, his greatest vulnerability. He falls deeply in love with Draga Mašin (Milla Jovovich), a lady-in-waiting to his mother, a widow over a decade his senior, intelligent, cultured, but widely despised by the public and the powerful as a social-climbing adulteress. Their private scenes are intimate, tender, and defiant—a union of two outsiders against the world. Against all advice, Alexander marries her in 1900.
ACT II: THE ROYAL FORTRESS
The marriage ignites a firestorm. Draga is slandered as barren, a sorceress, a former courtesan. The press, controlled by opposition parties and foreign interests, savages her. Alexander, fiercely protective, becomes increasingly autocratic. He suspends the liberal constitution, rules by decree, and surrounds himself with Draga’s family, who are seen as corrupt interlopers.
We are introduced to the brewing storm in the form of Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević (Chris Kolić), a fiercely patriotic, coldly ideological army officer known by his codename “Apis.” He views the Obrenović dynasty as corrupt, decadent, and an obstacle to a “Greater Serbia.” To him, Alexander is a puppet of Austria and Draga is the corrupting tumor. In smoky Belgrade kafanas, Apis and his fellow officers in the “Black Hand” begin to whisper of regicide as a patriotic duty.
Alexander and Draga, now virtual prisoners in the Konak palace, sense the walls closing in. In a desperate attempt to secure the succession and silence rumors of Draga’s infertility, they announce she is pregnant. The announcement is met with widespread disbelief. When it is revealed to be a false pregnancy (or a tragic miscarriage, twisted by propaganda), the last vestiges of their credibility shatter. The public humiliation is complete. The royal couple is now seen as not just immoral, but delusional and treacherous.
ACT III: THE MAY COUP
June 1903. The conspiracy, led by Apis, crystallizes. The film cross-cuts between the paranoid, gilded isolation of the palace—where Alexander and Draga share quiet moments of doomed love, aware of the threats but powerless to stop the tide—and the meticulous, brutal preparations of the officers. Apis is not portrayed as a mere villain, but as a fanatic utterly convinced of his historical necessity, a dark mirror to Alexander’s stubborn idealism.
In the early hours of June 11th, the officers and their troops storm the Royal Compound. Jolie’s direction here is not of heroic action, but of horrific, claustrophobic terror. The electricity is cut. The palace is plunged into darkness.
Alexander and Draga hide in a secret wardrobe in the Queen’s chambers. The soldiers, drunk on plum brandy and zeal, ransack the palace. The search is agonizingly slow, violent, and chaotic. They are discovered.
The assassination is brutal, intimate, and grotesquely chaotic. Alexander is shot multiple times. Draga, in a final act of defiance, throws herself over his body and is bayonetted. Their corpses are mutilated and thrown from a palace window into the garden below.
EPILOGUE:
Dawn breaks over a silent, bloodstained palace. The conspirators, now seeming smaller and stained with gore rather than glory, install the rival Karadjordjević dynasty. Apis stares at the bodies, his face unreadable—a man who has unleashed a beast he can never cage. The final text reveals that this regicide, endorsed by much of the political class, set a precedent of political violence that would echo through the Balkan Wars, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (organized by Apis), and into the bloody 20th century.
Visual Tone: Aesthetic contrasts between the opulent, jewel-toned but stifling interiors of the palace (inspired by late Victorian and Balkan art) and the gritty, smoky, masculine world of Belgrade’s streets and army barracks. The camera remains intimate, often using close-ups on Jukić and Jovovich’s faces to capture their emotional isolation, and steady, chilling compositions for Kolić’s Apis.
Themes: The corrosive nature of isolation and propaganda; the conflict between personal love and public duty; the birth of modern political terrorism; and the tragic price of being ahead of, or outside, one’s time.