I saw Sean Bean strutting his bubonic stuff in ‘Black Death’ last night. Not bad. Certainly not as bad as it could have been.
Plot recap: It’s 1349. England’s population has been scythed down by the bubonic plague. Word gets around that there’s one village untouched by the pestilence. A knight by the name of Ulric (Sean Bean) and his band of followers want to check it out. They grab a young monk, Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) as their guide. Osmund has an ulterior motive in joining them. This involves, predictably if not especially appropriately for a wannabe monk, a hot medieval wench.
Anyway, off they pop to find the village. When they get there, they find a balding bloke called Hob (Tim McInnerny) presiding over a hotbed of necromancy. Since this is a horror film, set in a violent age, bad things soon happen, many of which involve bubonic pustules; some of which involve divorcing innocent people from their limbs.
Good points: for a relatively low-budget film about a medieval disease, Black Death is surprisingly beautiful. The sets and costumes are convincing, and the landscape, shot in a chilly palate of grey-greens and slate, feels just right. The freckled Redmayne is cast very well. He has a startled, supernatural look about him, which works very well here. Sean Bean is all gruff voice and prickly beard: you know what to expect from the Bean, and you get it in spades.
Bad points: this is basically The Wicker Man in tights. But with less Britt Ekland. The horror isn’t particularly weird or scary, just a bit gross. The necromancer (Carice van Houten) is pretty but not very sexy – which is a crime against the trade of necromancy IMHO. The narrative arc is a bit flat: Ulric and the gang don’t have to do much questing to find the plagueless village, and when they get there, things aren’t really all that mysterious. The ending, in which a disillusioned Osmund wanders the world doing evil of his own, strains for coldhearted brutality, but actually just feels a bit mean.
But overall, this is a decent, well-shot, uncompromising picture. It has a strong sense of place and plague, and although my companion at the screening claims I snorted all the way through at minor anachronisms, I actually thought it was a pretty faithful vision of what fourteenth-century England might have been like. (All except for the weird Anglo-Saxon names, that is.)
Not pestilential cack, then. Lord have mercy on us all.
Black Death is released in May
