Beyond Fest 2020: ‘The Reckoning’ Witch Hunt Film Is Plagued With Missed Potential

Neil Marshall’s The Reckoning starts with a bang (and a little literacy): an image of a mass grave, and text explaining that it’s the Great Plague in England, 1665. Seeking a scapegoat, ‘Witch Finders’ are employed to discover the source of the scourge which, in a violent patriarchal time (surprise!) is attributed to witches, women who reportedly consort and conspire with the Devil, bringing Satanic power and disease upon the “good” people of the community.

The film proceeds with a whirlwind tale, largely visual, showing a woman, Grace (Charlotte Kirk) and her romance with her husband Joseph (Joe Anderson) until he succumbs to the plague (in a pretty but structurally repetitive and highly melodramatic opening). It’s certainly possible to have a rapid-fire story of love and loss successfully open a film (looking at you, Pixar’s heartbreaking opening four minutes of Up), but the repetitive structure, somewhat awkward stream of cuts, and Kirk’s melodramatic performances in this sequence deny it of the power it could have hypothetically had.

We resume with a widowed and grieving Grace, now facing difficulties making a living following the loss of her husband. She can’t get enough work and can’t make rent, which unsurprisingly puts her at the mercy of the predatory landlord Pendleton (Steven Waddington). Grace spurns his advances, and he proceeds to accuse her of witchcraft. His accusations are, of course, immediately believed and spread throughout the area. Grace soon finds herself imprisoned and elaborately, routinely tortured by Judge Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee) in the hopes of ripping a false confession from her. Grace has to withstand the torture, escape the trials, and save her stolen child against all odds.

Luke Bryant’s cinematography and the production design both excel, generating a strong sense of place and some truly lovely imagery. Some of the exterior shots have a properly otherworldly feel that lacks a little in the interior shots… it would have been a welcome effect in those scenes as well. Nonetheless these factors contribute to a film that looks great and lived in with some wonderfully dreamlike imagery. Christopher Drake’s rich score is also a strong element, walking the fine line of driving the film along without distracting from its events. Overall these elements create a strong atmosphere, perhaps the most successful aspects of the film.

The film also contains some properly memorable scenes—the few occasions where Satan appears are visually fantastic and seem like the moments where Marshall is most comfortable with the material—they always land, and the composition, pacing, and dialogue excel—but unfortunately they fail to have any real connection to the film’s central narrative and are sort of forgotten about by the third act. And Sean Pertwee’s villainous Judge Moorcroft is written with the complexity of hangman’s noose but he manages somehow to create a character that, through all the menace, feels like a complex man trying to protect the community, however perverse and wrongheaded it is in actuality.

The script, co-written by Marshall, Kirk, and Edward Evers-Swindell (The Descent) otherwise deals with heavy issues, notably the histories of bad men using power and patriarchal violence against women. It approaches that topic, however, with the nuance of blunt force trauma, with over-the-top, often on-the-nose dialogue that often feels like ‘first pass’ writing that would require substantial honing to sound like something a person (rather than a character) would say. It doesn’t help that Kirk’s turn as Grace alternates between wooden and unbelievably melodramatic, and the make up and costume work are too refined and camera-ready to believably sell her in the torturous, dirty, diseased world and add the realism that the performance lacks.

The film’s certainly a period revenge epic, and with that territory comes a significant dose of torture—extensive periods of sleep deprivation, physical torment, whipping, and devices that are too gruesome to be described are used on our heroine (the worst of which, inexplicably, she later seems entirely unaffected by). It’s a film that, much like The House that Jack Built, isn’t fully as gory in exhibition as it could be, but the cringe-factor comes from the idea of the tortures inflicted. It certainly sells the idea that these ‘witch trials’ subjected innocent women to abysmal torture to elicit false confessions, but the end payoff may not be worth the discomfort caused by long periods of watching violence against women—it’s well-tread ground and, frankly, nothing really new is accomplished by it.

Altogether The Reckoning has to reckon with its own missed potential. Marshall is certainly a talented filmmaker with a stunning early record—Dog Soldiers is a simple, elegant cult classic, and The Descent is an exceptional and nearly flawless film, but The Reckoning fails to meet the potential of either of those entries. The major elements of the film, from a wooden central performance to blunt, artless dialogue, to torture sequences that somehow fail to add gravitas, seem intended to hammer the film’s themes into the audience instead of putting the audience into a believable world with characters that feel real, and therefore you empathize with them. The end result is a movie that deals with real, heavy topics—but ends up being hard to watch for all the wrong reasons.

The Reckoning had its U.S. premiere at LA’s Beyond Fest 2020.