Creepy games and cleaned-up plague
(Cert: 15)
All isn’t quite as it seems in this semi-comedic drama from Wild Canaries director Lawrence Michael Levine. Featuring an arresting and career-best turn from Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation, Ingrid Goes West), Black Bear is not only two films in one but also offers two headscratching stories in which the lines between reality and fiction are purposefully blurred.
To preserve the mystery surrounding the two storylines, it’s perhaps best not to give too much away regarding the film’s intriguing duelling narratives. Set at a remote lakeside house, Black Bear revolves around a filmmaker’s dangerous and cruel mind-games in the pursuit of artistic perfection.
Just as the symbolic nature of its title suggests, Black Bear is first and foremost about what happens when a person is pushed to their limit both physically and emotionally. Levine presents a deliberately disjointed and deceptive narrative which often feels like a haunting feverdream and where characters and storylines are interchangeable.
Plaza gives a disarmingly raw and beautifully layered performance as an actress who has to dig deep into her own emotions to deliver the best work of her life. Meanwhile, the always brilliant Christopher Abbott (It Comes at Night, Possessor) manages another tour de force as a man obsessed with perfecting his art to the detriment of his loved ones. Overall, Levine has given us one of the most effective, provocative and brilliantly devised dramas of the year. Black Bear successfully explores its subjects’ innermost insecurities and suspicions and is further elevated by a first class performance from Aubrey Plaza.
The Reckoning
(Cert: 15)
★★✩✩✩
This small scale horror offering from British director Neil Marshall ( Dog Soldiers, The Descent) has ambitions beyond its clearly diminished budget and, sadly for all involved, it really shows. Set in 17th century England, it follows the story of Grace Haverstock (co-writer Charlotte Kirk), a woman accused of being in league with the devil after losing her husband (Joe Anderson) in the Great Plague.
Sean Pertwee stars as the fearful Judge Moorcroft, the man who burnt Grace’s mother at the stake some years earlier and who is called upon by local lawmaker Squire Pendleton (Steven Waddington) to help extract a confession from the young widow accused of witchcraft.
The film is clearly inspired by similarly themed productions — Witchfinder General springs to mind — but it’s clear from the offset that there is very little here that we haven’t seen done better, with more conviction before.
Quite aside from its one-note and bafflingly lacklustre performances — Pertwee being the exception here — perhaps the most jarring aspect of The Reckoning is how clean and shiny it all looks. As a result, at no point during the film did I ever feel like I was watching something set during the Great Plague, but rather a sanitised version of it.
What’s more, for a film purporting to tell a story about the female persecution during a dark chapter of our collective history, there is an awful lot of completely unnecessary depiction of violence and torture which often feels exploitative and needlessly graphic. Disappointing, to say the least.