You would be hard pressed to find a better backdrop for a horror movie — and particularly one being released in the current climate — than the Great Plague. With The Reckoning, Neil Marshall, the indie filmmaker responsible for Dog Soldiers and The Descent, doesn’t merely use the pestilence as a backdrop, however. Every pustule oozes, every desecrated corpse stinks and every violently bloody eruption splatters with sickening efficacy. Marshall has long proven himself a maestro of gore, but he makes a compelling case in his latest film for showing the after-effects of horrific acts rather than ruminating on the acts themselves. The Reckoning is gooey and disgusting, but it’s not gratuitous. Hell, the film is borderline feminist.  

The Reckoning’s heroine is Evelyn (Charlotte Kirk, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Marshall and Edward Evers-Swindell), a young mother who has just lost her husband (Joe Anderson, seen mostly in flashback and hallucinatory visions) to “the sickness.” Left to raise their daughter alone, Evelyn is forced to barter the couple’s wedding rings to money-grabbing landlord Pendleton (Steven Waddington), who would much rather trade sex in exchange for the rent. After Evelyn rebuffs his advances, Pendleton tells the entire town she’s a witch. The young woman is swiftly captured, her baby ripped from her arms, and thus begins the legally dubious process of extracting her “confession.” 

Comparisons to Robert Eggers’ celebrated horror story The Witch are unavoidable, but The Reckoning actually shares more DNA with another British, female-led story of personal hardship — William McGregor’s highly underrated Gwen. Although set during the industrial revolution, McGregor’s film crackles with the same supernatural sensation that a woman’s spirit cannot be broken no matter how much her body might be. In The Reckoning, though, Evelyn is put through the ringer in a very literal sense. The arrival of witchfinder Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee) and his great, big pointy hat signals that the protagonist is about to be strapped into variously horrifying-looking wooden instruments. 

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Although Evelyn is indeed poked, prodded and even has tools inserted into her, Marshall doesn’t fixate on her suffering. When instruments of torture are gleefully introduced, the camera cuts to the protagonist’s stoicism-turned-unbridled anguish and then quickly cuts again to show only the aftermath of her ordeal — typically, bloodied body parts and clothing. It wasn’t too long ago that so-called “torture porn” was being heralded as the next big thing in horror. To see somebody like Marshall, a gore aficionado through and through, staking a claim for what’s seldom seen being more horrifying is a major step forward. And, crucially, it works like gangbusters. 

The decision not to delight, and by extension asking the audience to delight in Evelyn’s pain, also speaks to The Reckoning’s unsteady position as a low-key feminist picture. Aside from Kirk making mincemeat of the lead role and having a defining hand in the at-times uneven script, the whole movie stems from one man’s rejection by a woman he feels is beneath him. The central conflict emerges from his bruised ego chafing against Evelyn’s unbreakable resolve. The decision to put a female helper alongside Moorcroft, who’s been taken in by his delusions of grandeur, is similarly progressive and provides an interesting wrinkle in the greater narrative.