My review as originally published on Flickering Myth's website on February 24, 2021:

Director Neil Marshall has a history of making movies that thrive on darkened blood, add demonic features to the human body, and share a pallid, grainy aesthetic. He likes to get the adrenaline going, but in recent years has tunneled in to blunt, flagrant bombast that tries to disguise that the writing isn’t as well-executed as some of the imagery is striking. The Reckoning is an attempt to reel in the ticks and return to a more grounded sensibility. However, old habits die hard.

In the film, the Great Plague has rotted the bodies and minds of people throughout England. As humans tend to do in periods of strife, the “religious” English find other people to blame; this case involves pointing fingers in persecution of women who stand out, are less fortunate, or are vulnerable, decrying them as witches that are cursing their country and neighbors. Frontier woman Grace (played by Charlotte Kirk) loses her husband after he goes in to town, contracts the Plague, and kills himself to protect her and their infant child. Soon after, Grace’s landlord threatens and tries to rape her, she fights back, and the town gets to buzzing about how she is a witch that sent her husband to Hell.

Grace’s immediate capture by officers is guaranteed. When the accused is brought forward, the presentation of flawed evidence is the only prosecution needed to convict a woman of witchcraft. Most of The Reckoning takes place following Grace’s conviction, when specialized religious officials try by means of torture to get Grace to confess before they execute her.

In the opening scenes, The Reckoning establishes Grace as not simply a victim, but a strong, independent, skilled, and ultimately resilient woman trying to free herself from the constraints and prejudices of her time. This is only a problem because we don’t get to know much about her past (aside from the fact that when Grace was a child her mother was killed in front of her) and how such an anomaly for this period of history came to be. The person Grace is doesn’t fit the environment she has been written into; nowadays, women sticking up for themselves and having rights isn’t a groundbreaking notion, but back in the 1600s, for most people, it would be radical and alien.

Neil Marshall hasn’t entirely crafted this movie for today’s feminist movements. In fact, The Reckoning is positing its star, Charlotte Kirk, as a victim of the system around her; she has come under scrutiny these past few years due to her career blossoming after having intimate relations with a couple of Hollywood moguls. Kirk and  Marshall are currently engaged, and the film was cowritten between the two of them and Edward Evers-Swindell after Marshall likened the allegations against his fiancée to a “witch hunt.” The character Grace struggles with the issues of her times, but her attitude and actions come from the woman portraying her.

Putting the motivation and personal drama behind The Reckoning aside, there is genuine conflict in the story, and Ms. Kirk’s energy comes through, even though as an actress she is not very good at expressing emotion. If a viewer didn’t know of her relationship with the director, you couldn’t fault them for thinking that Charlotte was chosen for the movie because someone involved in the making of it was turned on by her body and wanted to graphically show her more than once, with no parts of her body left covered, having sex with her character’s deceased husband, who sometimes turns out to be the Devil (such a reading of the material would say that the film gives in to misogynistic inclinations by treating Grace as much of an object as the other characters in the story do, with Kirk’s lack of emotive capabilities either saying Grace is cold and unable of true human expression, or as traumatized by the world around her to such a degree that she has to detach herself in order to survive).

Other actors (particularly Sean Pertwee as Judge Moorcroft) have the opposite problem, hamming the material up enough that The Reckoning‘s harsh muchness doesn’t end with the serious plot, modern-day comparisons, and partly unhinged filmmaking and story/tonal structure choices that make things uneven; the overacting of sparse lines from dangerous, brazenly ignorant characters pushes things out of the vicinity of the realm of realism, further illuminated by Kirk’s contrast in approach and direction.

All things considered, The Reckoning ends with an exciting, rousing finale that could sway less critical viewers more in the film’s favor. This is a messy product from a once-promising director, but a possible guilty pleasure to look in to whenever one is in the mood for that sort of thing in the future. Or put another way: If you need a break from neat and tidy genre filmmaking and don’t mind noise, phlegm, and underdeveloped, ham-fisted social issue soup…well, nothing’s stopping ya.

Rating: 2 3/4 /5

My review as originally published on Flickering Myth's site on February 10, 2021:

No, The Mad Hatter has nothing to do with the goofy fellow from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but the movie still acknowledges that connection throughout its runtime by mainly spending it around the villa of a wealthy 19th century hatter whose favorite pasttimes included intoxicating masquerade parties, well-prepared tea, hormonal orgies, and getting nearly everybody high on drugs. Oh, and it just so happens that the hatter might be a madman as well.

This last point, however, is mainly inferred as opposed to shown. The Mad Hatter opens with a short scene where the Hatter’s daughter accidentally causes a fire during one of her father’s parties, killing everybody inside; not much is learned about the Hatter’s nature during this, and even after the movie then proceeds to jump over a century into the future for the remaining time, there is still very little expressed beyond the fact that all these years later he has become infamous.

There is a lot wrong with The Mad Hatter, with the writing being one of the most damning features. Our protagonists are four “modern” college students who are brought to stay at the villa for a few days by their odd parapsychology professor, David Hart (played by Armando Gutierrez), in an attempt to study how the supernatural affects them. The more that happens to them, and the more they can do to instigate things, the better. It’s alright if you’re a bit puzzled by this setup, because pretty much not a single thing happening in the movie is explained or justified, just thrown at the viewer and characters as soon as they can be dished out. Take, for instance, that right after the students sign up for the trip to the haunted villa, Henry (Samuel Caleb Walker) walks around on campus and is immediately confronted by the disturbing spirit of a little girl who flickers on and off like a broken projector image. This, plus anything creepy or alarming that boldly happens for the first couple days of the study, is brushed off.

Beyond the faulty setup, logic, and world-building (which is forced and insubstantial), faults in The Mad Hatter‘s writing go on; the dialogue is poor and tasteless, the characters aren’t fleshed-out people (plus have next to nothing in the personality department), scares are the same dried-up variations on repeat, and the twist ending is completely predictable.

More shade can be thrown at The Mad Hatter: The acting is flat. The CGI special effects are subpar. The music fits but is overdone. But sure enough, the movie drags on, feeling two times longer than it is. If this production was analyzed any deeper, the list of faults would go on even longer.

A small amount of credit is due to those people who put together a musty visual scheme that would have been more fully realized with better support from the rest of the production; the underwater shots alone promise something richer than The Mad Hatter is capable of putting together.

All in all, The Mad Hatter is a movie to avoid, even for consumers who like watching bad movies. There is a good chance that viewers will leave or turn this off in the first 15 minutes; and true to their suspicions, sitting through the whole movie and waiting for something to latch on to proves to be fruitless and just not worth it.

My Rating: 1 1/2 /5