The Plague Is Catchy, But the Movie Isn’t
Neil Marshall once gave us The Descent, one of the best claustrophobic horror films ever made. Fifteen years later, he gave us The Reckoning, which feels like someone fed The Crucible, Braveheart, and a perfume commercial through a plague-ridden blender.
It’s technically about a woman accused of witchcraft in 1665, but emotionally, it’s about how even witch trials can feel sluggish if everyone’s too busy smoldering. The movie wants to be a brutal feminist scream against oppression but ends up whispering, “We could have fixed this in editing.”
The Plot (Such As It Is)
Grace Haverstock (Charlotte Kirk) loses her husband to the bubonic plague, which is a bad week even by 17th-century standards. She’s soon accused of witchcraft by her sleazy landlord and handed over to Judge Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), England’s “most ruthless witch-hunter.”
From there, the film promises torment, temptation, and demonic meddling. Instead, it delivers 90 minutes of damp misery, repetitive torture scenes, and Charlotte Kirk trying to act while looking like she wandered off the set of a haircare ad.
Grace is tortured repeatedly, hallucinates vaguely demonic images, and occasionally whispers defiance in ways that sound like an audition for Game of Thrones: The Musical. The Devil pops up, but mostly to look disappointed about being in this script.
Grace Haverstock: The Witch Who Never Really Hexes
Let’s start with Charlotte Kirk, who also co-wrote the film with Marshall. In theory, Grace should be a fascinating character—a grieving widow falsely accused, trapped in a patriarchal nightmare, who slowly embraces her own power.
In practice, she’s just sort of… there.
She’s tortured, she cries, she yells, she glares heroically through perfect eyeliner. The movie insists she’s a survivor, but it never lets her do much beyond endure. There’s no transformation, no catharsis, just a slow montage of increasingly grim close-ups.
Every scene feels like an excuse to frame her face dramatically against torchlight, as if the movie itself is terrified of letting the camera look away in case we stop believing she’s Important.
Kirk isn’t a bad performer; she’s just trapped in a role that mistakes suffering for character development. It’s two hours of watching her get dunked, burned, stretched, and smirked at by men who all seem to have received different scripts.
Sean Pertwee: The Only Person Having Any Fun
Sean Pertwee plays Judge Moorcroft, the witch-finder who’s apparently England’s answer to “what if Vincent Price and a pub bouncer had a baby?”
He’s the only one in the movie who seems to realize what kind of film he’s in. Pertwee growls his way through every line like he’s auditioning for a Hammer Horror remake that doesn’t exist yet. When he tortures Grace, you half-expect him to wink at the camera and pour himself a brandy.
He’s not subtle, but he’s entertaining, and in this movie that’s practically sainthood. Unfortunately, the script can’t decide whether Moorcroft is a gleeful sadist or a tragic zealot—so we get both, awkwardly stitched together.
Still, credit where it’s due: every time Pertwee’s on screen, the movie briefly wakes up like a corpse remembering how to twitch.
The Devil: A Cameo That Should Have Stayed in Hell
Yes, there’s an actual Devil. He’s played by Ian Whyte under enough prosthetics to make Hellboy look low-key. And yet, for all the buildup, he barely appears.
When he does, it’s mostly in dream sequences that feel like rejected perfume commercials for something called Sulphur by Satan. The Devil whispers tempting nonsense, Grace resists, the camera swirls, and you start checking how much runtime is left.
For a movie that’s supposedly about confronting evil—both human and supernatural—the Devil’s presence is weirdly perfunctory. He’s less an entity than an HR representative from Hell checking in to make sure the plot’s moving along.
Torture, Torture, and Oh Look, More Torture
Let’s talk about the elephant—or rather, the Iron Maiden—in the room. The Reckoning is obsessed with torture.
There’s hanging, branding, stretching, drowning—every creative method of making a human body suffer, lovingly shot and meticulously lit. It’s the rare horror movie where the torture scenes feel both too long and emotionally hollow.
The first time Grace screams in defiance, it’s powerful. By the tenth, you start to suspect she’s secretly auditioning for a metal album cover.
The violence isn’t even scary; it’s just numbing. Marshall wants to confront us with the brutality of misogynistic systems, but the direction is so glossy that it accidentally eroticizes the pain it’s condemning. Every lash looks like it was applied by a stylist.
Historical Horror or Heavy Metal Cosplay?
The production design is technically solid—mud, smoke, flickering firelight—but everything feels too clean, too staged. The peasants look freshly laundered, and Grace’s hair maintains perfect curls throughout multiple bouts of near-death.
It’s like the plague came to a Renaissance fair sponsored by Sephora.
There’s also an oddly modern sheen to everything, from the pacing to the dialogue (“You’ll never break me!” sounds more Marvel heroine than 1665 widow). The attempt to balance period authenticity with empowerment messaging ends up pleasing no one: historians will wince, feminists will groan, and horror fans will fall asleep somewhere between the rack and the branding iron.
The Neil Marshall Problem
This one hurts. Marshall once made Dog Soldiers and The Descent—two films that balanced horror, tension, and character brilliantly. Here, he seems adrift. The direction is competent but passionless, like he’s going through the motions of gothic misery without finding anything new to say.
The pacing lumbers, the scares are predictable, and every attempt at emotional intensity collapses under melodrama.
It’s possible that The Reckoning was meant to be a spiritual companion to his earlier, tougher work—another story about human resilience under monstrous pressure. Instead, it feels like a grimly self-serious student project from someone who still remembers how good he used to be.
The Plague That Ate the Script
Setting the film during the Great Plague should have been a goldmine. Paranoia, disease, superstition—it’s the perfect breeding ground for both literal and metaphorical horror. Instead, the plague exists mostly as a background detail, a kind of set dressing made of rats and coughing extras.
There’s no sense of dread, no creeping atmosphere, just a few generic shots of villagers dying and moving on. For a story about mass hysteria and human cruelty, The Reckoning feels strangely detached from its own world.
Even the witch-hunt theme—ripe for psychological horror or feminist commentary—gets reduced to endless torture and vague devil imagery. It’s like the movie is allergic to its own ideas.
At Least It’s Pretty
To be fair, The Reckoning is nice to look at. The cinematography is crisp, the fog rolls photogenically, and the Hungarian locations lend the film some visual heft. If you muted the dialogue and pretended it was a music video for a symphonic metal band, it would probably be perfect.
But good lighting can’t save bad storytelling, and here, the glossy visuals just highlight how hollow everything else is. It’s like watching someone frame their misery in 4K.
Final Verdict: A Witch Movie in Search of a Soul
The Reckoning (2020) wants to be a powerful feminist horror story about resilience in the face of patriarchal cruelty. What it actually delivers is an overlong, undercooked medieval misery pageant that mistakes endurance for empowerment and grit for depth.
Charlotte Kirk suffers convincingly, Sean Pertwee hams it up like a Christmas roast, and the rest is a blur of mud, firelight, and misplaced self-importance.
It’s not the worst witch movie ever made—but it might be the most self-conscious. You can almost hear it whispering, “Aren’t we profound?” while you reach for the remote.
If you want real witchy catharsis, watch The Witch. If you want plague-time horror, watch Black Death. If you want both—and don’t mind losing your will to live halfway through—The Reckoning is waiting, ready to stretch your patience on the rack.rt`6
