THE RECKONING (2020)

Studio:     Shudder/RLJE Films
Director:    Neil Marshall
Writer:     Neil Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, Edward Evers-Swindell
Producer:  Daniel-Konrad Cooper, Michael Marks, Steffen Wild, Esther Turan
Stars:     Charlotte Kirk, Joe Anderson, Steven Waddington, Sean Pertwee, Ian Whyte, Rick Warden, Bill Fellows, Mark Ryan

Review Score:

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Summary:

While the plague ravages England in 1665, a widow must defend herself from a cruel landlord and a deluded judge who accuse her of witchcraft.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Afflicted with the plague in 1665 England, farmer Joseph Haverstock hangs himself to avoid a painful death, leaving his wife Grace to raise their infant daughter Abby. Cruel landlord Squire Pendleton warns Grace about making timely rent payments now that she is alone on the farm.

Grace leaves Abby with her friend Kate Tobias and Kate’s husband Morton so she can go into town to inquire about making money. Bartender Ben Tuttle recounts how Grace’s husband drank from the wrong cup while in his pub, leading Grace to suspect Squire may have poisoned Joseph with pestilence.

Squire tries sexually assaulting Grace when he comes to collect payment. Sympathetic to Grace, Squire’s young servant Edwin Oswald considers intervening, but Grace finally fights off Squire. Squire threatens Grace before leaving.

Squire starts a rumor that Grace is a witch. Men working for Squire, including Kate’s husband Morton, burn down Grace’s house and take Grace and her baby captive. While imprisoned, Grace experiences recurring nightmares of her dead mother, husband, and Lucifer.

Day I – Grace’s strange visions continue as she is flogged in the public square. Squire sends for notorious witch-finder John Moorcroft, the same judge who had Grace’s mother Jane Hawthorne burned for witchcraft, to interrogate Grace.

Moorcroft arrives in town with his bodyguard Ursula, an accused witch who survived her burning and became loyal to Moorcroft. A man named Watkins attacks Moorcroft, accusing the judge of wrongly killing his innocent wife. Ursula protects Moorcroft by stabbing Watkins to death.

Day II – Moorcroft begins interrogating and torturing Grace. Grace pleads with Edwin to find out what happened to Abby every time he delivers food to her cell.

Day III – Based on the noose found with Joseph’s body, Moorcroft accuses Grace of driving her husband to suicide. Ursula also joins in torturing and interrogating Grace.

Day IV – Grace remains defiant as Moorcroft intensifies her torture. Unable to get a confession, Moorcroft sentences Grace to burn the next day.

Kate and Morton Tobias argue over their opposing views on Grace’s situation. Morton beats his wife. Kate saves herself by having their horse cart run over her husband’s head.

Grace and Edwin come up with a plan for Grace to escape with Abby. Edwin collects plague-infected blood from a dead prisoner with the intention of poisoning Moorcroft’s wine.

Moorcroft agrees to have an audience with Grace in his chambers. Moorcroft insists he won’t drink the wine unless Grace joins him. Anxious to infect Moorcroft and reasoning that she will be executed the next morning anyway, Grace drinks the wine too.

Grace stabs a knife through each of Moorcroft’s hands to pin him to his desk. Grace reminds Moorcroft that he killed her mother and also reveals she had their wine poisoned. Ursula attacks Grace. Ursula catches fire during their fight and jumps out of a window. Grace leaves Moorcroft in the burning room.

Edwin rescues Abby from Squire. Edwin then reunites Grace with her baby.

Telling Edwin to go on ahead with Abby, Grace brings down an unmovable door to separate them. Grace explains that she drank the poisoned wine and doesn’t want to infect Edwin or Abby. Edwin reveals he wasn’t able to poison Moorcroft’s wine. Grace instructs Edwin to bring Abby to her friend Kate while she returns to rescue Squire’s other prisoners. Grace beheads Squire during the subsequent prison escape.

Day V – Edwin finds Kate and they flee from town with Abby. Motivated by a vision of her husband, Grace also escapes to safety.

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Review:

Whenever a movie is so indescribably blah that I’m not sure what’s worth talking about, I’ll start with a summary and hope the act of typing brings something to mind. You can see where this review of “The Reckoning” is headed then.

The Great Plague ravages England. With disease claiming the life of lowly farmer Joseph Haverstock, Joseph’s wife Grace, who wears the makeup of a Maybelline spokesmodel despite rampaging pestilence, is left to raise their infant daughter Abby alone. It also leaves landlord Squire Pendleton breathing down Grace’s neck. Easy to identify due to dusty clichés constituting his characterization, Squire is as lascivious as he is cruel. Lip-licking leers telegraph Squire’s intentions to take advantage of the widowed woman. If she can’t make her monthly rent, he’s all too pleased to introduce an alternate way for Grace to pay.

Empowered by defiant resilience as the one note to her hollow heroine, Grace refuses to be abused by Squire. That’s no matter for the man. It’s 1665. All he has to do is make one whisper of witchcraft and the town will exact vengeance for him. After Grace fends off his sexual assault, Squire does exactly that, and his accusation leads to Grace’s imprisonment.

Never one to do his own dirty work, Squire summons a second man from the stock character closet to handle Grace’s inquisition. Beyond the basics of being a self-flagellating, steely-staring, no-nonsense ‘Man of God,’ Judge Moorcroft has a personal connection to Grace. He’s the same witch-finder who executed Grace’s mother for supposed demonry, and he sees fit to do the same to Grace now too.

The 350-year-old witch-hunt seems positioned to parallel present day politics as an allegory about systemic misogyny oppressing women through gaslighting and subjugation as well as tangible and intangible torment. But then there’s a sappy score laid on top that over-dramatizes a soap opera tone while hits of horror sneak in stray shocks to remind us this is supposed to be a Neil Marshall thriller, not a stuffy costume piece. By grasping at multiple identities, “The Reckoning” ends up without a distinct one of its own. The film thus plays more like cable television background noise than epic cinema, and more like a negligible episode of “Outlander” than a grand chapter in “Game of Thrones.”

There isn’t a unique personality to be found. After unenthusiastically stamping out Grace, Squire, and Moorcroft, the cookie cutter keeps hacking at flat dough with plain shapes like a fearful servant sympathetic to Grace’s struggle and a faithful friend whose standout scenes only involve her face taking the force of her husband’s fist. A complete coterie of inconsequential side characters, some of whom appear on the cusp of earning actual subplots until the script decides to stay narrowly dialed into Grace’s redundant torture, pitter-patters and chit-chats with such irrelevance, it’s a wonder all of their material didn’t remain on the cutting room floor.

The production design’s comparatively smaller scope represents a sizable step backward from director Neil Marshall’s lauded work like “The Descent,” “Dog Soldiers,” or even his “Hellboy” reboot (review here). I can’t make heads or tails of the intent behind some of Marshall’s scalp-scratching stylistic choices, such as sudden flashbacks or “Day I” through “Day V” chapter headings of zero narrative value. It’s not because Marshall operates on an advanced level of thematic filmmaking beyond an average moviegoer’s understanding. It’s because “The Reckoning” is too drab to inspire a synapse to fire in a disinterested viewer’s imagination.

Given their co-writing credits and her starring role spotlight, cynicism suggests “The Reckoning” is merely a vanity vehicle for Marshall and his fiancée Charlotte Kirk to play dress-up in Hungary while producers pick up the tab. With the announcement that Marshall’s next film “The Lair” will professionally pair the couple once again, I’m left to wonder if they’re just trading on clout to do “phone it in” projects where they can write whatever they want and dictate as many creative conditions as possible. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if it’s backed up by evidentiary entertainment. But the only proof “The Reckoning” provides is that Marshall and Kirk made a two-hour snoozer whose primary value is as a long look at the laboriousness of one woman combating false accusations, a longer look at Charlotte Kirk feigning pain for a BDSM fetishist’s pleasure, or as a surefire solution for shooting your attention span to ribbons.

Review Score: 40

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