Mark Reviews Movies: THE RECKONING (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 4, 2021

To watch The Reckoning is to feel little more than disgust. This is a movie that wallows in pain, misery, torture, and violence, and while there is meant to be righteous triumph at the end, the overriding sensation is one of relief. It's a movie, not to be watched or experienced, but to endure.

It was co-written and directed by Neil Marshall, a filmmaker who is no stranger to violent and bloody material but who also can be smarter about it than he is in this instance. The story comes from history, namely the Great Plague of London in 1665, which spread throughout the country and marked the end of significant outbreaks of bubonic plague in England, and the witch-hunts, which would continue legally for more than 50 years after the events of this fictional story. A woman suffers a terrible loss on account of the first historical event, and then, she spends the rest of the movie suffering because the second.

Marshall and his fellow screenwriters, Edward Evers-Swindell and star Charlotte Kirk, don't have much to say about the horrors of the plague or the fanaticism driving the witch trials, except to say that they happened and were quite terrible. This, of course, will come as no surprise to anyone, so with surprise and insight as non-starters, Marshall seems set on trying to repeatedly shock us.

Kirk plays Grace Haverstock, the anachronistically pretty wife (She is perfectly made-up, even while living amidst the gloom of a castle dungeon) of a poor farmer somewhere in the English countryside. Joseph (Joe Anderson), the husband, left his wife and newborn daughter (There's a flashback to the child's conception, for some unknowable reason, leading to a nightmarish punch line) for a business trip into town. That story, in which Joseph contracts the plague and realizes his doom, is juxtaposed with Grace trying to cut down her husband's corpse, hanged from a tree, and burying his body. The misery, then, is unrelenting from the start, at least.

Grace, widowed and with only a month's rent remaining, is harassed by the farm's landlord Pendleton (Steven Waddington), a most disagreeable and dastardly squire. She pays for the coming month. He insists that she pay more in advance, so she digs up her husband's corpse and gives the landlord Joseph's wedding band.

Pendleton suggests another arrangement, tries to rape Grace, and, after she fights off the villain, threatens to ruin her. He does so by starting a rumor in town that Grace is a witch, and since the townsfolk have been busy torturing and killing accused witches lately, they're happy to go along with it.

Most of the remaining story is devoted to scenes of Grace alone in the dungeon, where she's visited by ghosts (of Joseph and her long-dead mother, who was burned alive on witchcraft charges in front of Grace when she was just a child) and the Devil himself, and ones of the innocent, faithful woman facing most horrifying torture under the orders of Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee). He's a religious judge with a reputation for forcing confessions from accused witches—including Grace's mother all those years ago.

With all of this—a wronged woman, a murdered mother, a husband whose death turns out to be no accident, an abducted child—in place, the final act of this story seems set in stone. For as much as Marshall lingers on moments of violence and pain, we know there has to be more to this misery than just the more historically likely ending. Revenge is on the table, for sure.

It takes a long time and a lot of discomforting scenes of physical and sexual violence to reach that point, though. Grace is flogged in the public square, tied to a post where her friend was hanged for witchcraft only a few days prior. She's stabbed all over her body with tiny daggers. For the worst of it, Moorcroft introduces a device that is inserted and then cranked open to reveal a pointed blossom. While the filmmaker is thankfully brief (with the daggers) or suggestive (with the blossoming torture device) in showing us Grace's pain, that's all there is to this story for a long stretch, beyond the shallow and confused spiritual crisis she endures during those dark nights of the soul in her cell.

The bigger point, obviously, is Grace's endurance in the face of this pain, humiliation, and questioning of her virtue. That's all there is to this character, played with hollow conviction by Kirk, and after a while, it seems as if the pain is all there is to The Reckoning—before it goes through the motions of its revenge-fueled climax.

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