Black Death - I saw this on a recommendation from Cruds. It's on netflix instant stream for those who are curious.
European medieval movies, when done correctly, can be some of the most unforgiving and brutal affairs of entertainment. And why not? The period wasn't called the "Dark Ages" for nothing - mounting pestilence, rampant ignorance of just about everything in the physical world, unchecked violence and social degradation, and perhaps most of all, a seething hatred for all things non-Christian. Black Death, much like my personal medieval favorite Fleash and Blood, expertly simplifies but punctuates these points.
The premise is fairly simple - agents sent by the Catholic Church travel to a secluded marsh village that is untouched by the Plague. These agents, led by Sean Bean's Ulric, believe that the town is unscathed thanks to dark, demonic practices (re: remember, people loves to burn witches back then). Their mission is to find what they believe is the necromancer, and make a point with him (re: torture and execute him pubically). What they find instead is a pagan village, lively and untouched by the disease, but probably not exactly what it seems.
The film itself borrows heavily from other films, most notably the original Wicker Man. However, things really aren't as cut and dry as one believes them to be, and while the truth isn't exactly a new idea, it is sort of fascinatingly simple with what's going on in the village. Along the way, there are some brutal executions that are presented with enough detachment to make them fairly creepy and unsettling. But perhaps the most disturbing details lie in just what these people believe. Let me say that this is not an Anti-Christian or an Anti-Pagan film at all - the director Christopher Smith doesn't make any hard judgements on either sides. But there is a severe ugliness in all of the characters - not enough to make us hate anyone, but just enough to allow the viewer to sit back and say "Whew, are these people f***ed up in a big way".
With that in mind, the performances are uniformly excellent, and most of them are nuanced based on the sheer pace of the film. Ed Redmayne plays the naive young monk with equal parts uncertainty and sheer terror. Bean, as always, is a brilliant spectacle to behold, and alters the material with his own brew of hellbent intensity. He plays a man of faith and conviction with complete aplomb - the viewer knows within five minutes of screen time that this character will never, ever give up his faith, no matter what. Carice van Houten plays the mysterious and slightly ominous pagan leader of the village, who I thought created decent pangs of pathos in a role that could have easily been severely one-dimensional. The rest of the cast is absolutely fine, my other favorite being the vastly underrated John Lynch as a world-weary knight who has seen far too much carnage in his time.
I sincerely enjoyed this film, and while it ends on a somewhat fascinating note, it truly is not a feel-good period film. It's a movie that does not make a hard stand on what is right and wrong - it simply chooses to tell a story, one that is wrought with a lot of unsettling and disturbing angles of religious intolerance and fear. But often times, that can be the best sort of period drama, one that does not make blanket statements of the time and instead chooses to travel down the dark tunnels of the human heart, wherever they may go.
4/5