The third Fantastic Beasts film admits what the first two kept dodging. Albus Dumbledore is in love with the dark wizard he cannot fight. That confession, made to Gellert Grindelwald himself, is the engine of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, and it is also the only thing in the film that feels like a real stake.
Everything around it is machinery.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
A blood troth and a broken qilin
The plot runs on two devices. The first is the blood troth, a pact that stops Dumbledore (Jude Law) and Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) from harming each other. The second is a qilin, a magical creature with psychic abilities. The International Confederation of Wizards traditionally selects its Head by the qilin, which bows to someone pure of heart. Grindelwald slits a newborn qilin’s throat and intends to harness its precognitive power.
That is a clean setup for a thriller. The film does not deliver one.
Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is handed a mission and a team by Dumbledore: Theseus (Callum Turner), Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), and Ilvermorny Charms teacher Lally Hicks (Jessica Williams). Dumbledore gives Jacob a fake wand, Theseus a red and gold tie, and Lally a book, and tells them nothing about why. The film treats this as intrigue. It plays as noise.
| Element | What the film does with it | What it earns |
|---|---|---|
| Blood troth | Blocks a Dumbledore–Grindelwald duel | Real tension |
| Qilin election | Grindelwald seeks to exploit a murdered creature | Mild stakes |
| Credence reveal | He is Aberforth’s illegitimate son and Albus’s nephew | Confusion |
| Newt’s team | Given objects with no explanation | Frustration |
Mads Mikkelsen replaces Johnny Depp
The casting change is the film’s loudest fact. Johnny Depp shot three scenes as Grindelwald before Warner Bros. asked him to step down in November 2020, following the verdict in the Depp v News Group Newspapers Ltd case. Mikkelsen replaced him that month.
Mikkelsen is the better Grindelwald. He plays the wizard as a politician, not a peacock — calm, reasonable, and therefore more frightening. Depp’s version was a performance. Mikkelsen’s is a threat. The film gains a villain and loses nothing.
What it does not gain is a story that knows what to do with him. Grindelwald is acquitted of all criminal charges in Berlin by Anton Vogel (Oliver Masucci), the outgoing Supreme Head of the ICW, which lets him run against Vicência Santos and Liu Tao. The election is the spine of the back half. It never generates the dread it should.
Ezra Miller and the Credence problem
Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller) is the series’ longest-running thread and its most tangled. The second film told us he was Aurelius Dumbledore, brother to Albus. This film corrects that: he is Albus’s nephew, the illegitimate son of Aberforth (Richard Coyle).
That is a retcon, and it lands with a thud. Credence spends the film hunting Dumbledore in Berlin, is disarmed quickly, and learns the truth about his parentage. Miller plays the hurt well. The script gives the hurt nowhere to go.
Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol) has the better arc, such as it is. She watches Grindelwald slit the qilin’s throat, then visits Credence and relays Grindelwald’s suggestion that he kill Albus. Sudol does more with a silent reaction than the film does with a dozen speeches.
What the film gets right, and what it does not
The film is 142 minutes, directed by David Yates from a screenplay by J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves. It is the third and final instalment in the Fantastic Beasts series and the eleventh in the Wizarding World franchise. It was pushed from November 2021 to April 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, shot from September 2020 to February 2021, and premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in London on March 29, 2022.
The creatures are still the best part. Newt helping the qilin give birth in Kweilin is the one sequence with warmth. The Erkstag prison rescue has invention. Law’s Dumbledore is quieter than the role usually allows, and the film is better for it.
But a franchise finale needs to close something, and this one closes a blood troth and an election and calls it an ending. The Credence reveal rewrites a promise instead of paying it off. The team’s unexplained objects, to this reviewer, never pay off at all.
The Secrets of Dumbledore is not a disaster. It is a film that knows its best idea — a great wizard in love with the wrong man — and keeps it in a subplot. The confession should have been the movie.
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