Neil Marshall returns to the director’s chair after the disastrous 2019 reboot of Hellboy with The Reckoning, set during the great plague of London in 1665, where villagers convince themselves that the sickness is the work of the devil and witches. The film follows Grace Haverstock (Charlotte Kirk), who, after the suicide of her husband (Joe Anderson) who was sick from the plague, is framed for witchcraft by the town’s squire (Steven Waddington). She is then tried by Judge Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), who believes she is cursed by the devil and must confess her “crimes” in order to be absolved of her “sins”. While an interesting shell of a film is presented through its opening sequence, The Reckoning is a monotonous, overlong slog filled with never-ending sequences of torture and minimal character development.
The Reckoning’s cold open is the best part of the movie, contextualizing the film’s era in black and white, with eerie music setting the tone (and atmosphere) of what’s to come. The paranoia aspect of the plague is highlighted through its text, which could make you believe that the film would concentrate on the psychological effects of the great plague and how easy it is to fool an entire village when sickness can infect anyone at any time. This could make an interesting parallel with the era of disinformation conspiracy theorists propagate during the current pandemic, easily drawing audiences into their wild theories and making them believe the virus is a hoax.
However, this is the only time The Reckoning will ever talk about the plague’s paranoiac aspect. The opening credit sequence shifts in tone to a poorly-written and edited melodrama, as any character development stops after the audience learns why Grace’s husband killed himself in an unnecessary non-linear sequence. We know nothing of the characters, only that the protagonists are “pure of heart” and “courageous,” and the antagonists are exaggerated as selfish murderers, who are only in it for themselves and money. Pertwee delivers the film’s only good performance as Judge Moorcroft, a cold and self-obsessed servant of God who made himself believe to be a witch-finder by deepening his attachment to Christianity.
When the film starts giving us a glimpse of how psychotic Moorcroft’s obsession with God is, by showing him self-flagellating in front of a cross while praying for divine guidance, it is the only time Marshall will ever give us compelling character development. The violence Moorcroft inflicts upon himself is the only reason why he can easily persuade a village through his lies on witchcraft. The further he is from the truth and the more he wraps himself up in his version of Christianity, the easier it is for him to perform brutal acts of torture and get away with it. This is also the only time Marshall will ever justify the sickening violence he subjects the audience to, as most of The Reckoning’s runtime constitutes of exploitative torture porn.
There’s barely any point to the torture sequences Marshall painstakingly makes as the film’s primary focus. The audience has to endure multiple scenes of misogyny, near-rape, abuse, and maltreatment for…nothing. Some could argue that the torture sequences were there to develop Grace’s hatred of Moorcroft, who was the judge who ordered her mother to be burned. Yet, we don’t need to have most of the film’s runtime consisting of never-ending torture to understand this; we’ve already gotten a clear flashback during the beginning that introduces Moorcroft and shows Grace, as a child, watching her mother dying. The only torture sequence that didn’t feel pointless was Moorcroft’s self-flagellation since it made the audience understand his fanaticism to Christ, but the rest of it feels empty.
Once the film’s climax starts, it becomes more apparent to the audience that most of what was previously shown, through sequences of extreme violence and cryptic dreams involving The Devil, will amount to nothing. They were unimportant for understanding the thinly-developed story, added nothing to the protagonist’s tormented psyche, and were only there to fill the runtime. The Reckoning’s cold open showed the potential it had to the audience to create a horror film based on the great plague’s paranoia and explore how it led to the creation of witch-finders. Yet, that potential is ruined once it is clear that the film won’t explore those themes and would make its viewers endure interminably violent sequences of torture that amount to absolutely nothing. Because of this, The Reckoning is nothing but a dull, hollow, and undercooked story that desperately tries to be taken seriously, but most of its acting and shameless exploitation makes it very hard for the audience to take it seriously. You’re better off watching Nicholas Hytner’s The Crucible instead.
