The Reckoning

Is Neil Marshall sending a message with the opening to his new period supernatural horror, The Reckoning? His horribly mauled and mangled version of Hellboy was always going to struggle to come out of the shadow of Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Mike Mignola's two-fisted Satan-buster, but the fact it was subject to a last-minute hatchet edit was never more clear than the almost unintelligible opening montage. In his follow-up, the director of instant horror favorites The Descent and Dog Soldiers opens with another such sequence, one that actually sets up the story at a less-than-breakneck speed. Unfortunately, while The Reckoning is the return of Marshall as a talented crafter of a movie, he cannot weave that old black magic of telling a decent story so well.

With clear nods to the 1970s wave of witch hunt cinema (most especially the bloody British classics of Witchfinder General aka Conqueror Worm, and The Blood on Satan's Claw), The Reckoning puts its heroine through five days of merciless trials at the hands of a witch hunter. Grace Haverstock (Kirk) is recently widowed by the Great Plague of 1655, or rather by her husband's suicide when he finds he is infected. Initially traumatized beyond measure, Grace dons a large hat, mounts a horse, and sets off through a series of Dutch angles across a rural England covered in crosses and rats before being accused of witchcraft. It's actually just a ruse, as she resisted the lecherous and rapacious advances of her rent collector and he claimed she was a witch in fetid revenge. After the locals try to extract a confession by rending her flesh, they decide to go pro by calling in the witch finder, Moorcroft (Pertwee in his own spectacular hat), and his assistant, Leonora (Holzer), who bears the outward scars of her own torture and the inward brand of having confessed on the stake.

Marshall attempts to put this all into a historical context with a closing card noting that 500,000 women were executed for practicing black magic in the era of the witch trials, which is a statement that may make historians of the era roll their eyes (that period is roughly 300 years, the academic consensus on the death toll was around one-fortieth of that number, and while the victims were more likely to be women, around one-fourth of all of those butchered by religious zealots were men). Those distinctions and details are important because the actual witch hysteria was so hideous that it doesn't need overstating, and to get those newly-researched details right would make The Reckoning feel more timely. But Marshall's real intent is to continue creating memorable horror movies carried by women, as he did in The Descent and his Scottish Mad Max riff, Doomsday.

Unfortunately, he decides to hang this film off Kirk, and that's where the potion goes sour. Her performance is more Faye Dunaway in cheeky bodice-ripper remake The Wicked Lady than Anya Taylor-Joy's rounded depiction of magical madness and misogyny in The Witch. Moorcroft spends much of the film putting her through unendurable agonies to force a confession, and once they're done she just sort of ... walks them off, even mounting a daring and action-packed escape in the final act. Pricking, the witch's bridle, the pear of anguish (don't ask), nothing affects her demeanor. Even as Marshall creates an impressively stylized version of Restoration-era England, the stakes never match the events. Unresolved appearances by a Satanic figure in Grace's dreams are seemingly meant to give a hint of either evil sneaking in or her grasp on reality softening, but neither interpretation really factors in to the resolution. It's just a chance for some cool effects on a hackneyed old horror.