When Neil Marshall returned to horror with The Reckoning in 2021, the expectations were complicated by history. The director who had made The Descent — still among the most formally rigorous horror films of the century — had spent a decade working in television, including some of Game of Thrones‘ most spectacular sequences, before stumbling with Hellboy‘s 2019 reboot. A period horror set in 17th-century England, among plague survivors and witch-hunters, felt like a return to ground he knows: intimate dread, female endurance, historical horror.

The film opens on an England still reeling from the Black Death. Plague has not simply killed — it has hollowed out the social fabric, leaving a countryside swimming in fear and theological panic. Grace (Charlotte Kirk) is a young widow whose husband, infected with the pestilence and unwilling to risk spreading it, has taken his own life. What follows is a relentless narrowing. Her landlord, Squire Pendleton (Steven Waddington), demands she repay her late husband’s debts in kind. When she refuses, the machinery of accusation turns on her: she is arrested as a witch and handed to Judge Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee), England’s most feared inquisitor — a man who has elevated cruelty into a professional discipline.

Marshall’s staging in the opening act is assured. He understands that dread in this register works through accumulation rather than shock — that the real horror is not something arriving from outside the frame but a society building efficiently toward ordinary atrocity. Cinematographer Luke Bryant shoots the English countryside under permanent overcast, the light grudging, the shadows early. This is not the gothic excess of candlelit corridors but the grey mundane of a system in operation.

Charlotte Kirk, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Marshall and Edward Evers-Swindell, carries the film on a performance of sustained physical commitment. Grace’s ordeal — the rack, the branded flesh, the sleepless nights in a stone cell — is not aestheticised as spectacle but presented as consequence. Kirk refuses sentimentality: Grace does not transcend her suffering with nobility. She survives by increments, held together by anger and a refusal to give the system what it demands. It is a harder performance to bring off than it looks, and she brings it off.

Sean Pertwee as Judge Moorcroft provides the film’s most unsettling register. He is not a leering sadist but a professional: meticulous, devout, convinced of his own righteousness. The horror of his performance is the horror of bureaucratic evil — the understanding that history’s worst atrocities are committed by those who have transformed cruelty into procedure. Marshall resists making Moorcroft baroque. He is, in the worst possible sense, reasonable.

Where The Reckoning shows its seams is in its screenplay’s structure. The narrative geometry — false accusation, escalating ordeal, climactic confrontation — follows a track that audiences familiar with the subgenre will have mapped before the third act arrives. More disruptive are the hallucinatory sequences in which Grace is visited in her cell by the devil: visions that feel imported from a different, more expressionistic film than the one Marshall has otherwise been making. These interludes serve neither impulse fully.

The historical canvas is real and remains relevant. The English witch trials of the 17th century — in which hundreds of women were accused, tortured, and executed at the instigation of men who stood to gain from their confessions — constitute one of the more systematic episodes of gendered violence in British history. Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General who operated between 1644 and 1647, is the historical template for Moorcroft. Marshall has described The Reckoning as both historical witness and feminist statement. Both intentions are visible on screen, even when the screenplay does not always measure up to the ambition it is reaching for.

The Reckoning is not Neil Marshall at his most formally ambitious — The Descent remains the masterwork, a film that demonstrates exactly how to use confined space and female psychology to construct unbearable dread. But this is purposeful, morally serious period horror: a film with something to say about the machinery of accusation and the persistence of women who survive it. For audiences prepared to sit with sustained discomfort rather than merely observe it, it earns its place.