Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Reckoning’ on Shudder, a Period Witch Hunt Thriller That Falls in its Own Fire

After surviving the total poopshow flop that was 2019’s Hellboy, director Neil Marshall returned to his lo-fi horror roots with The Reckoning, now streaming on Shudder. Of course, there have been so many reckonings, atonements, redemptions and penances in movies lately, in order to properly contextualize this one, one has to differentiate this particular instance from the others. Marshall — who co-wrote the screenplay with Edward Evers-Swindell and star Charlotte Kirk and — goes back to a centuries-old reckoning, ye olde witch trials, specifically the ones that happened in 17th-century England, a time and place rendered infamous by the abhorrent deeds of ye olde witchfinders. That’s where we start with this movie, now let’s see where it goes.

THE RECKONING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS, reads a title card, but this isn’t a BOATS movie (you know, Based On A True Story) because it’s based on one very basic thing, that women were persecuted and executed for no reason by religious cretins. (So I guess it’s an IBAEM, but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue so nicely, does it?) ENGLAND 1665, reads another title card, followed by some scrolling exposition about how it’s the time of the Great Plague, which was clearly brought about by the devil, and the devil is friends with witches, witches who therefore deserved to be burned at the stake. And the gist of it is, this was a truly suckass time to be alive, because not enough things had been reckoned with, I reckon.

So there’s a town here, bestricken by the plague, a real bring-out-yer-dead (CLANG) type of town, and just outside the town lives a perfect little family in a humble little hut on a quaint little farm: Joseph (Joe Anderson) and Grace Haverstock (Kirk), and their infant daughter. The Haverstocks’ bliss is shattered when Joseph contracts the germ and ends the misery by noosing himself right the f— out. Grieving like heck, Grace hikes up her 117 skirts and cuts him down and buries him during a rain torrent and the only thing that keeps her digging are some brief flashbacks to halcyon times when she and Joseph shtupped each other dry and made a baby. Notably, the Haverstocks are/were the only clean(ish) people in the town and she’s definitely the only one in the zip code with eyeshadow and a decent conditioner that wasn’t bought at the grocery store, but at a quality salon.

Things go further to shit when Grace realizes she has no money to pay the rent to Squire (Steven Waddington), a total ape of a grunt of a landlord who tries to rape her. She fights him off and he’s not happy about it, so he accuses her of witchcraft, and the local officials get up to their ignorant superstitious shenanigans and the local angry mob is pleased as punch about it. Squire snatches the baby and Grace is tossed in a medieval jail where conditions are abhorrent because there’s apparently only grocery-store conditioner available for her to use, and maybe the chemicals are seeping into her skull, which might explain why she keeps hallucinating that her dead husband is there with her, and sometimes he’s also the devil, with the horns and eyes and everything, which makes her sexy fantasies more than a little bit sacrilicious.

Famous witchfinder John Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee) is called in to find the witch, which isn’t hard, because the alleged witch is already in jail. But ol’ Witchfinder Johnny finds himself in a battle of wills with Grace, who refuses to confess, and endures all manner of vile torture and gruesome objectification. I guess there’s an outside chance that Witchfinder Moorcroft will admit he has indeed failed to find a witch, but it’s far more likely that things will get brutal before this is all over. Either way, NO SPOILEST THINE FILM.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This has none of the stuff that made some of Marshall’s early work (I’m looking at you specifically, The Descent) top-notch genre fodder. The Reckoning made me think of Paul Verhoeven’s controversial medieval-times rape movie, Flesh and Blood, and that’s what Marshall’s work here is — watery Verhoeven, thrice removed.

Performance Worth Watching: Hard pass.

Memorable Dialogue: “Did somebody say… WITCH?” — Squire delivers this one with a healthy preggo pause

Sex and Skin: Rear female nudity in the following situations: Humping your husband, humping your husband except he’s not your husband and is actually Satan, torture-related strippings-down.

Our Take: Hi, this is a movie about the gross mistreatment of women that sure seems to revel in the gross mistreatment of women. It feels like a tasteless exploitation movie from 1983. It’s violent and sadistic and if it’s supposed to be Me Too 1665, it sure is a failure, because it goes through the B-movie motions — pointless nudity, ridiculous gore — before becoming a revenge flick that gives naught but a thin veneer of off-the-shelf outrage and lacks any of the character depth and moral righteousness, or even the kitschy tongue-in-cheekiness, that might have made it halfway decent.

At the 45-minute mark, we get a title card reading DAY I, marking Grace’s first day in the clink. From there, the movie rotates through scenes of Grace being tortured (with whips, pointy jabbers and unspeakable things), scenes of her talking to Squire’s sympathetic assistant — I think his name is Plot Device — and scenes of her hallucinating about seeing dead people and/or The Great Horned, And Apparently Very Horny, One, all accompanied by the same seven organ notes on the soundtrack. Over and over again. Rinse, repeat. With a brief pitstop in a character who’s the witchfinder’s head torture person, a scarred-up one-time accused witch who survived her burning; neat, but the subplot goes nowhere.

It all ends quite perfunctorily with lots of violence, hissing and a reminder of the old movie cliche: if an elephant gun is introduced in an early act, it will inevitably show up in the third. This is a nicely photographed movie, and hooray for practical effects and all that, but tonally it’s dumb and ugly and woefully miscalculated. Late in the film is a moment where one of the bad guys is clobbered with a pisspot, which struck me as a metaphor for the experience of watching the movie.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s a line in The Reckoning about throwing things into “the plague pit.” The jokes write themselves!

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch The Reckoning on Shudder