Fantasia 2020: The Reckoning is a Disappointment | Awesome Friday!

The Righteous

Set in the 1600s, Charlotte Kirk plays Grace, a woman who has just lost her husband to the plague currently going around the shire she lives in. Her landlord, the amoral and self-centred Squire (Steve Waddington), still demands rent be paid even though she can’t work the land and has a newborn and tries to take payment by other means. 

By “other means”, I mean he tries to rape her, and when she rebuffs him with a well-placed heel to the face, he returns to town and starts the rumour that she might be a witch. Enter a Witchfinder, played by Sean Pertwee and an hour or so of torture.

And that’s it. That’s the whole movie. Grace is tortured and refuses to break. She hallucinates her dead husband and the devil she is accused of consorting with, but nothing comes of these scenes. The Reckoning has multiple opportunities to go in more interesting directions, and it takes none of them.

Link: https://awesomefriday.ca/2020/08/fantasia-review-the-reckoning-is-a-disappointment/