Evelyn, a young widow haunted by the recent suicide of her husband Joseph, is falsely accused of being a witch by her Landlord after she rejects his advances.
Neil Marshall has directed some really good movies throughout his career: “Dog Soldiers,” “The Descent,” “Doomsday,” and various episodes of well-known TV shows like “Black Sails,” “Game of Thrones,” “Hannibal,” and “Westworld.” While his latest outing, the medieval horror-thriller “The Reckoning” is enjoyable, overall, it fails to live up to the quality of his earlier movies, specifically “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent,” which I would have to say is his best film to date.
“The Reckoning” takes place in Northern England in the year 1665 where we are introduced to Joseph Haverstock (Joe Anderson) and his wife Grace (Charlotte Kirk). Having recently just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Josepha and grace are happy in their small house out away from the city where people are dying as a result of the Great Plague. When Joseph comes home late from work one evening with a high fever and coughing, he tries to brush it off like it’s no big deal, stating it will soon pass but Grace rushes outside to pick elderberries to help with his symptoms. While she is outside, Joseph, well aware that he has the plague, takes his own life for fear of passing it on to Grace and their baby.
A month later, Squire Pendleton (Steven Waddington), the owner of Grace’s house, drops by, wanting to know how she plans on paying her rent. She tells him that she will find a way but when he informs her that they can come to an arrangement whereby he can have sex with her whenever he wants, she refuses and they get into a scuffle. She burns him with a red-hot poker and he quickly leaves. In town, he visits the local pub and provokes the patrons, convincing them that Grace is a witch and that she killed her husband using witchcraft. She is arrested and brought to Pendleton’s castle where she is held in a small cell for the arrival of John Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), a famous but brutal witch hunter who has forced confessions from thousands of women all around the country.
When he finally arrives, he utilizes everything in his arsenal to break Grace, but he fails at every turn, her resilience and strength too tenacious for him. Afraid of being upstaged in front of Pendleton and the locals who have come to witness his renowned interrogation methods, he foregoes her confession and categorically accuses her of being a witch and sentences her to be burned alive at the stake, along with her newborn baby daughter. The night before, Grace, along with the help of a young stable boy who has pity on her, concocts a plan and then asks to speak to Moorcroft in private. She begs for the life of her daughter, in exchange for her confession and he agrees but before he can gloat in his sanctimonious arrogance, she quickly turns the tables on him, forcing him to experience the perspective of all the innocent women he has condemned to death over the years, including Grace’s own mother.
“The Reckoning” is beautifully shot and visually impeccable, while the sets and locales are flawlessly evocative of the actual timeframe in which the story takes place. The cast gives it their all, especially Charlotte Kirk, who carries the emotional weight of the entire movie on her shoulders. Where the film falls down, however, is in its anticlimactic finale. Throughout the movie, we are given small hints and inferences that Grace is actually a witch, along with her mother before her, and just when you are ready for her to unleash holy hell on everyone and everything around her, à la Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” we get a clichéd and uninspired denouement, where the bad guys all succumb to unimaginative deaths, there is no fitting conclusion, and the film just ends. So many times a great movie has been let down by a disappointing finale, unfortunately, “The Reckoning” falls into that category and leaves you to wonder what could have been.
Available on Blu-ray and DVD April 6th
