APRIL 17 — The Oscars are arriving next week on April 26 and I’ve still got a few more films to catch, especially the ones in the animated and foreign language categories, so looks like I’ll be writing about that next week, including my predictions for the major categories.
The pandemic, and the lack of blockbusters flooding the market because of it, has turned 2020 (and early 2021) into a pretty interesting cinematic year, which made people focus more on the smaller films that kept getting released on streaming and VOD platforms.
So, before I focus on the more “serious” films dominating this year’s Oscar season, why not have a bit of fun and soak in some genre thrills first?
As is the norm — even before the pandemic — there are quite a few genre films, especially of the lower budget and indie kind, being released every week on the various streaming and VOD platforms out there.
It’s just a case of whether you want to seek them out and discover some potential new favourites, or not. I have to admit though that it is a bit of a crap shoot when it comes to your chances of actually coming across good ones amid all the dross being released.
If you’re looking to catch something in Malaysian cinemas this week, there is a genre movie currently playing that’s also a major player in the Oscar race this year — Promising Young Woman — which I’ll write about next week.
For now, let’s take a look at these two rather under-the-radar gems, shall we?
The Reckoning
If you’re a long-time genre film fan, the name Neil Marshall should be quite familiar or at the very least ring a bell, thanks to the success of his early films like Dog Soldiers, The Descent and Doomsday.
Those newer to genre film fandom should at least know him for the Hellboy reboot from 2018, which got mixed reviews from mainstream film critics but was quite loved by genre film critics and fans for the funnily brutal and gory way that Marshall treated the source material.
The Reckoning is another unexpected left turn in Marshall’s career in that even though its subject matter — witch hunts in medieval England — might point to another piece of brutal genre fun, the actual film plays more like a straight-up melodrama sprinkled with brutality, blood and gore only towards the end as the inevitable torture scenes arrive.
For most of its running time, The Reckoning felt more like a #MeToo movie set in medieval England, as its main character Grace is put through the wringer.
First, she loses her husband to the plague, when unbeknown to her, he was actually deliberately poisoned with the plague by their landlord, Squire Pendleton, who assumes that by getting rid of the husband he’ll be able to extract rent from Grace through “other ways.”
When she refuses, the Squire then plays the “witch” card, and so begins a witch hunt against her, with the town’s men testifying against her, and before long an infamous witchfinder called Judge Moorcroft arrives to squeeze (aka torture) a confession out of her.
I have to admit that this is definitely not in the same class as the immortal Witchfinder General, but it’s a pretty damn effective, involving and brutal melodrama nonetheless, and when I found out that lead actress and co-writer Charlotte Kirk launched legal suits against a number of high-level Hollywood executives, alleging mistreatment and extortion of sexual favours for career advancement, it gave the film even more subtext and weight.
Happily
Having watched this movie without even seeing the trailer, I more or less walked into it blind, having no prior knowledge of even its plot summary.
For the first few minutes, I thought I was watching a raunchy comedy, as its leading couple Tom (Joel McHale, of Community fame) and Janet (Kerry Bishe from Halt and Catch Fire), spend a lot of their time having sex in all sorts of places and with shocking frequency, and this after 14 years of marriage!
Their friends are so annoyed by their “happily married” shenanigans that things finally come to a head when they are disinvited from a planned weekend getaway.
However, a home visit from a mysterious stranger the next day, claiming that they’re “defective” and that he’s there to inject them with a “cure” finally throws their whole world into disarray, as that whole visit ends in an accidental killing, and they’re then mysteriously reinvited to join the aforementioned weekend getaway.
From there, the film has quite a bit of fun keeping the viewers off-balance, as we try to guess what happens next, whether that mysterious stranger is really involved with some kind of cosmic force or whether it’s all just a prank by one of their friends.
I was hoping for a more outlandish conclusion/resolution as the film marches towards the end, but what we actually get is acceptable enough, though it definitely prevents the film from scaling the heights that the premise initially promises.
Still very much a fun and thrilling watch, go seek this one out. It might just make you think deeper about the state of your marriage/relationship later on.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
