Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Neil Marshall
Starring: Charlotte Kirk, Sean Pertwee, Steven Waddington, Joe Anderson
As the blurb that closes out Neil Marshall's The Reckoning tells us, over
500,000 women across Europe and North America were executed for practicing
witchcraft. Of course, the truth is that witchcraft was simply an excuse to
punish women who defied the rules set down by Christianity, and the threat
of being burned alive was a tool used by many men to hold sway over women.
To justify such actions, the Christian accusers would force a confession
from such women, usually extracted after days of prolonged torture. If they
ever bring back this practice, they might use Marshall's own film as a
particularly cruel method of torture, as it's so bad I was willing to
confess to being a warlock myself if I thought it would make the end credits
arrive a little sooner.
From the off it feels as though Marshall is employing this idea as a way to
hitch onto the MeToo movement, but unwittingly his film is more resonant to
our current times through its backdrop of the Great Plague. When farmer
Joseph (Joe Anderson) contracts the plague, he hangs himself to spare his
wife Grace (Charlotte Kirk) and their infant child from contracting the
deadly disease. Left with no means to pay the rent on their small holding,
Grace rebukes the aggressive "compromise" offered by her landlord (Steven
Waddington), who decides to exact revenge by accusing her of
witchcraft.
The land's top witch-hunter, Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee, looking a lot like
Peter Wyngarde in his iconic Jason King role), arrives to extract a
confession from Grace, who is confined to a prison and forced to stay awake
24 hours a day. This leads Grace to suffer hallucinations in which she is
visited by the Devil himself, or perahps she really is being visited by Satan. In one of several laughably misjudged
decisions on the film's part, Grace has sexual romps with Old Nick, which
reminded me of that movie Sherilyn Fenn made back in the day where she
becomes the lover of a sasquatch type creature (I swear I'm not making this
up).
Moorcroft fails to coerce Grace into a confession, but the truth is he's
not exactly trying very hard. He never thinks to threaten the life of her
child for a start, and she's not subjected to much in the way of physical
torture. In fact, Grace never really seems to be suffering at all. Despite
her hardship, she always looks like she just stepped off a fashion runway,
and I'm pretty sure nobody in 17th century England had such gleaming white
teeth. Kirk seems to be lit by an entirely different cinematographer, as
though she's Marlene Dietrich and doesn't care about authenticity so long as
she looks fabulous (the fact that she happens to be Marshall's other half
may have something to do with this). Given how unfeasibly glamorous Grace is
compared to everyone around her, can you blame them for thinking she might
have made a pact with the Devil?
Kirk's Instagram looks aren't the only anachronisms on display here, with
characters speaking such historically dubious lines as "I'm tired of your
shit." The generic teal and amber lighting scheme screams 21st century and
the sets lack the necessary lived in quality. At times you feel like you've
accidentally stumbled onto a Duran Duran video, especially during the cheesy
sex scenes.
I suspect Marshall may have been aiming to create a sort of b-horror
Passion of Joan of Arc, along the lines of how Roger Corman and Vincent
Price gave us a glorious drive-in take on Shakespeare with Tower of London, but the
movie doesn't embrace its trashiness enough to compensate for how dull the
whole affair is. There is one great splatstick moment involving death by
horse carriage, a brief reminder that this is the director who gave us the
riotously fun Dog Soldiers, but otherwise The Reckoning is an ordeal no
woman (or man) should have to endure.
