Director – Neil Marshall – 2020 – UK – Cert. 15 – 111m
***
A woman accused of witchcraft finds herself pitted in a battle of wills against her witchfinder torturer at the time of the Great Plague – on digital from Friday, April 16th and Shudder UK from Thursday, 13th May
On the one hand, this explores the historical time period of the Great Plague and links that directly with women being burned at the stake for witchcraft by way of a widespread, social scapegoating process. On the other, it depicts a horribly misogynistic society where, for the most part women are regarded as inferior and treated really badly. Two sides of the same coin.
The film itself is mixed. Parts feel hackneyed, parts will have you on the edge of your seat. The cliché-ridden opening, for instance, cross-cuts chocolate box-y photography of a cottage-dwelling couple’s idyllic, married existence in the constantly sunlit countryside with the wife digging a grave in torrential rain after finding her husband has hanged himself from a tree at night.
It transpires that farmer Joseph Haverstock (Joe Anderson) stopped off for a pint at the local tavern and accidentally drank the beer of a plague victim, contracting the disease. He selflessly kills himself rather than take the chance of passing it on to his beloved wife Grace (Charlotte Kirk, also one of the screenwriters – Ocean’s Eight, Gary Ross, 2018) and baby daughter Abby. Thereafter, her landlord Squire Pendleton (Steven Waddington – The Imitation Game, Morten Tyldum, 2013, Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton, 1999, The Last Of The Mohicans, Michael Mann, 1992) who fancies her and, as it turns out, engineered Joseph’s fatal drink seeks to take advantage, culminating in his attempted rape of Grace in her cottage.
Following that, the Squire enlists the help of Witchfinder John Moorcroft (the impressive Sean Pertwee – Dog Soldiers, Neil Marshall, 2002) to exact Grace’s confession of witchcraft before she’s burned at the stake. At this point the film becomes a battle of wills between the arrested innocent and the witchfinder, its core content and greatest asset. Will he be able to exact the desired confession? Will she be able to hold out against his assorted instruments of torture, wielded by former accused and burned witch turned witchfinder’s assistant Ursula (Suzanne Magowan)?
At its least convincing, this has the failed rapist Squire suggests to the local pub clientele that Grace is a witch and watches everyone in the pub laughably come to the same conclusion in a minute or so. Elsewhere, though, this much more effective with Marshall staging a plague-ridden hamlet (with corpses being licked by dogs), rat-infested dungeons and numerous sex scenes (mostly flashback or dream sequences) of Grace and her husband.
Although it’s never suggested that witches are real (beyond the label’s undeniable use as a means of scapegoating women) or that Grace is in any way a witch herself, the sex flashbacks / dreams become a springboard for bizarre fantasies in which she is suddenly cavorting naked with not her husband but the Devil (Ian Whyte – Prometheus, Ridley Scott, 2012), horns and all. Throw in the hideously deformed Ursula, Moorcroft’s arsenal of torture instruments and a heroine determined not to let him win and the stage is set for a terrific, climactic showdown. There’s also a surprise “did the censor really let that through at 15?” sequence of a cartwheel crushing part of a man’s head.
Not in quite the same class as Marshall’s best work (Dog Solders, 2002, The Descent, 2005), it’s an uneven affair, tremendous and gripping in parts, tired and trite in others.
The Reckoning is out on digital in the UK from Friday, April 16th and Shudder UK from Thursday, 13th May.
Trailer: