"The Reckoning" a sinfully tedious chore to endure

The Reckoning (2021)

In Europe and North America, up to 50,000 women have been tried, tortured, and executed for supposed witchcraft. That much might be true, and perhaps someone, like a Robert Eggers, can one day make an interesting witch-hunt film from that factoid because “The Reckoning” certainly is not it. Excluding all intentions of what this was supposed to be, one has to just take British writer-director Neil Marshall’s word for it that the script he co-wrote with lead Charlotte Kirk and Edward Evers-Swindell was scrupulously researched to be “inspired by actual events.” As is, “The Reckoning” is a dreary and sinfully tedious chore that neither disturbs nor haunts as a period tale of would-be female empowerment.

A portentous opening crawl, scored to an overblown degree, establishes that the people of England during the Great Plague in 1665 were desperate to blame the pestilence on witchcraft, the Devil’s work. From there, we meet Grace (Charlotte Kirk), a recent widow whose husband Joseph (Joe Anderson) is found hanging by his neck from a tree outside their home. How her husband fell to the plague and then killed himself, while Grace was off finding a natural remedy, is intercut with Grace burying his body in an inelegant sequence of ten whole minutes. Left all alone with her baby daughter, Grace must come up with payment for her landlord, Squire Pendleton (Steve Waddington). When he tries to assault her as his property, Grace fights back, but rejecting the squire forces her to be accused of being a witch and being placed on trial by ruthless witch hunter Judge Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee). In between being tortured, Grace is thrown into a cell and begins to be visited by the Devil and the ghosts of Joseph and her dead mother, who was burned at the stake for witchcraft in front of Grace as a child. If Grace can get out of this, she seeks revenge.

Not every auteur needs to make his or her specific mark on a project to make it worthwhile, but beyond recognition, “The Reckoning” looks and feels like it was made by an amateur at times. Liking his dream sequences quite a bit here, Neil Marshall also isn’t one to shy away from violence and gore. While some of it is germane to the period, there is exactly one gnarly, applause-worthy gore gag involving an abusive husband and a horse-drawn carriage. Scene after scene of Grace being tortured begins to feel like exploitation without a point. Making the experience feel even more punishingly one-note and interminable, title cards count down each day. The lucky viewer gets to endure Grace being flogged in the town square and then being tied down to be stabbed and have a “pear of anguish” placed between her legs. 

Charlotte Kirk looks as pretty as a rose throughout, and that might be the only suspense generated as to whether or not Grace is a witch, or else how would she remain so impossibly done-up? Otherwise, her performance is blank earnestness without much complexity beyond playing a victim who courageously suffers, and boy, does she suffer. Kirk does get numerous opportunities, however, to show her naked backside in gratuitous sex scenes, including one with a chiseled, growling form of the Devil. Perhaps Marshall should have saved such things for the bedroom—Kirk is his real-life girlfriend—because these sequences are laughable.

One refuses to believe that the Neil Marshall responsible for this is the same filmmaker behind the expertly tense “The Descent” from fifteen years ago. Then again, this is from the same man who in between made 2008’s energetically junky “Doomsday,” which was at least fun in a what-the-hell? kind of way. This is not that. To anyone who thought Marshall’s messy but gleefully pulpy 2019 reboot of “Hellboy” was a disaster, “The Reckoning” is a laborious sit that one can’t wait to be over.

Grade: D 

RLJE Films and Shudder are releasing “The Reckoning (111 min.) in theaters, on demand and digital February 5, 2021.