Fantasia 2020 review: Neil Marshall’s ‘The Reckoning’ is basically a gory Lifetime movie

The first virtual edition of Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival is here! In the coming days, we’ll be presenting capsule reviews of a number of films screening at the festival, filmmaker interviews, and much more. All of our 2020 Fantasia coverage can be found here. For the full schedule and tickets, head to the Fantasia screening site. 

Released in the midst of a swirling Hollywood extortion scandal involving couple Charlotte Kirk and Neil Marshall (Kirk stars in the film and co-wrote it with Marshall, who also directs and executive-produced the film), The Reckoning is sadly nowhere near as exciting as the real-life drama surroundings its release (a planned online Q&A following the film’s premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival was cancelled at the last minute).

Set in England in 1665 as the plague rages throughout the country, we meet Grace Haverstock (Charlotte Kirk), who has just had to bury her husband. With a new baby to support, she’s in fear of losing her home to her creepy landlord Squire Pendleton (Steven Waddington) — when she rejects his advances, he spreads a rumour that she is a witch, which lands Grace in prison. Remaining defiant, Grace is brought before the dreaded Witchfinder (Sean Pertwee), who will stop at nothing to get her to confess, even if it kills her.

Neil Marshall’s work on Game of Thrones is evident in The Reckoning, which often feels like a mundane episode of the show but without its lavish production value — set almost entirely inside a dilapidated prison, the film is as dark and colourless as its subject matter. Marshall is skilled at shooting action sequences and knows how to build tension, but Kirk doesn’t possess any of the gravitas to play a role like this. She’s never convincing as a woman in her horrific predicament, which gets drastically more noticeable during the film’s brutal torture scenes. She’s not entirely to blame — for some reason, Marshall shoots her looking like she just stepped out of a salon, even after enduring unspeakable acts of torture.

The film hints at an interesting idea — what if a woman persecuted for witchcraft was actually a witch or in league with the devil? Unfortunately, the film never goes very far with that notion and follows a fairly predictable journey as Grace struggles to escape from her captors.

It’s clear The Reckoning is meant to be a star vehicle for Kirk  — she’s made up and shot like a model even while in a squalid prison, and we’re meant to be rooting for her when she eventually gets to turn the tables on those who have imprisoned and tortured her. But the film is simply too hokey to take seriously — it almost feels like an ultra-gory Lifetime movie, with the sort of stilted acting and overbearing soundtrack that makes those made-for-TV movies so tedious.

The Reckoning is not without its charms — gorehounds will love some of the kills on display, and Marshall provides some effective jump scares early on in the film while the audience is still trying to sort out exactly what’s happening to Grace. It may not amount to much overall, but it shows that the director of modern horror classics like The Descent and Dog Soldiers hasn’t completely lost his ability to make us squirm.