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After six installments, the Harry Potter saga finally reaches its conclusion with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—at least in book form. On screen, however, the finale was famously split into two films, straightforwardly titled Part 1 and Part 2. While dividing a story due to length wasn’t unprecedented—Quentin Tarantino did it memorably with Kill Bill—the Harry Potter franchise is widely credited with kick-starting the modern blockbuster trend of splitting a final chapter in two. Its success paved the way for franchises like The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games, and Divergent to follow suit, though the latter famously stalled. The downside is that Part 1 often feels like only half a movie, ending on a cliffhanger and playing more like an extremely expensive episode of a TV series than a fully self-contained film.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Harry, Ron, and Hermione abandon Hogwarts and go on the run after Voldemort seizes control of the Ministry of Magic, committing themselves to Dumbledore’s final mission: finding and destroying Voldemort’s Horcruxes. Following a dangerous escape from Privet Drive, the trio uncovers fragments of Voldemort’s past while struggling with isolation, fear, and growing tension among themselves as they move from hiding place to hiding place. Their journey leads them to learn about the mysterious Deathly Hallows, powerful magical objects tied to wizarding legend, which complicate their understanding of Dumbledore’s intentions.
I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but by now my criticisms of the series boil down to two main points. First, the films have gradually drained the sense of magic by opting for a drab, desaturated color palette. This is still a dark movie, but at least it returns to more natural color grading, allowing the characters’ skin tones to look, well, human again. Second, the later entries feel less like proper standalone films and more like episodes of a television series. This is most apparent here, where the source material is split into two movies, making it nearly impossible to watch one without immediately needing the other.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is most notable for how radically it departs from the structure of the previous films. The first six entries each followed the rhythm of a full school year, with Harry, Ron, and Hermione uncovering a mystery between the end of summer and the close of spring. Along the way, familiar beats would recur: a game of Quidditch, a Christmas interlude, and Hagrid introducing some new magical creature. Part 1 abandons that formula entirely, picking up immediately where The Half-Blood Prince left off. Dumbledore is dead, Voldemort is tightening his grip on the wizarding world, and Harry must be whisked away to safety. Having ended the previous film with the retrieval of the first Horcrux, the story now becomes a grim quest, as Harry, Ron, and Hermione set out to locate the remaining Horcruxes—and the Sword of Gryffindor—in order to destroy them.
Despite Harry having to go to great lengths to conceal his location, the film still finds time for a Weasley family wedding—which, unsurprisingly, comes under attack. It’s small moments like this that feel oddly illogical. The same applies to the series’ shaky rules around teleportation, or “apparition,” as it’s called here. In the previous film, Dumbledore clearly demonstrates the ability to teleport, both at the beginning and the end, yet the logistics and limitations of this power are never properly explained. In Part 1, apparition is used repeatedly—sometimes simply as a convenient way to travel quickly, other times as an easy escape from danger. This raises the question of why the elaborate evacuation from Privet Drive was necessary at all, since they seemingly could have just teleported to safety. Later, during the film’s finale, it’s suddenly stated that apparition can’t be used to escape by the human cast, but house-elf Dobby is able to do. In the end, the rules governing teleportation remain frustratingly vague, making it feel less like a defined system and more like a convenient plot hole.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, much like The Half-Blood Prince, places a strong emphasis on expanding the lore and deepening the backgrounds of its central characters. We meet Hermione’s parents for the first time, learn more about Voldemort’s past, and gain further insight into Harry’s parents as well. This added depth enriches the story and helps justify the film’s hefty two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Despite the relatively limited progress in the main quest—with the trio retrieving only one Horcrux and the Sword by the film’s end—it’s never a boring watch.
What works in this installment is that the stakes feel genuinely real. While the previous film killed off Dumbledore—though I half-expected him to return in some form beyond flashbacks—Part 1 takes things further by killing off two major characters. Mad-Eye Moody meets his end off-screen early on, while another character has a more heroic, sacrificial death at the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange. Helena Bonham Carter, in particular, seems to be performing in a completely different movie from the rest of the cast, delivering her trademark manic energy, while everyone else plays their roles far more subdued. The contrast makes Bellatrix feel even more unhinged and lethal, solidifying her as arguably the deadliest villain in the series.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is another solid entry in a series that hasn’t produced a truly bad installment. That said, it’s hard to call it a “movie” in the traditional sense, since it functions more as a chapter in an ongoing story than a standalone film.
