THE RECKONING | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Neil Marshall (15, 110 mins)
Following the bruising reception afforded to his heavily-interfered-with reboot of Hellboy, British writer/director Neil Marshall returns to low-budget horror, where he made his name with the likes of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. This, however, is a rather ungainly historical piece with anachronisms, rather than the lean scarefest of his earlier work.
Set during the years of the plague and the Witchfinders, we follow the trials of Charlotte Kirk’s Grace, whose husband kills himself after contracting bubonic plague following a cheeky tankard switch by nasty squire Steve Waddington. He wants her land, property and her body for himself and is prepared to spread rumours of her potential witchery to get his way. Her mother had suffered the same fate, burnt at the stake before her daughter’s eyes, and so Kirk also finds herself victimized by the town – and moustache-twirling Witchfinder John Moorcroft, played by Marshall regular Sean Pertwee.
Grace is subsequently tortured, flogged and more in a bid to get a confession of witchcraft amidst the occasional fantasy. The possibility of the supernatural is raised, with her oily/sexy visions of the devil, the appearance of her dead husband and hallucinatory moments, but fizzle out unexplored: the very real horror of the time is left to be prevalent. The Reckoning, however, does not convey the true terror, squirm-inducing horror and unfairness of this moment in history. Kirk is glamorous throughout, moving as she does through too many jump scares and bursts of scary music.
It’s a dreary affair with clunky dialogue and questionable acting, far from the bravura of Marshall’s early work. There are flashes of visual brilliance – a lightning-lit search, Lucifer appearing through stone slabs – and some inventive gore, but the majority of the film is rather po-faced and there’s only so long you can watch a woman being tortured with a variety of implements. The battle of wills plods on between Kirk and Pertwee: she refusing to confess, he imperilling her soul via religious superstition and misogyny.
Bloated and overlong, this cannot surpass 1968’s Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General, to which it clearly owes a debt. Pertwee at least has some fun as the big-hatted torturer, but the film is not trashy enough to be fun, or serious and gritty enough to unsettle.
Released on VOD on Fri 16 Apr
words KEIRON SELF