Set all the way back in the 14th century, The Reckoning nevertheless raises some rather modern topics.
Caught in flagrante delicto with another man's wife, Father Nicholas (Paul Bettany) shaves his head, dumps his frock and flees. He runs into a traveling group of actors and joins their number. At the next village, they prepare to perform their old standby, Adam and Eve, which hasn't exactly been packing them in. The townspeople's minds are on another matter. A local healer has been accused of murder and will be hung.
The actors' leader, Martin (Willem Dafoe), has an idea, which goes a long way in explaining the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: blood and guts sell. The troupe quickly researches the crime and stages the events as they see them. Their box office take increases, but they soon realize that there is more to the murder than they had thought.
Director Paul McGuigan, who so far has specialized in ultracool, ultramodern flicks like The Acid House and Gangster No. 1, almost completely immerses himself in crude, muddy 14th century life, save for a few modern editing techniques, which jar the action from time to time. Based on Barry Unsworth's novel Morality Play, he and screenwriter Mark Mills avoid the usual Sherlock Holmes methods of crime-solving. These sleuths are rank amateurs and find their clues only by stumbling across them or forcing them into the open, regardless of the damage done.
Mills and McGuigan have tried to imagine the thinking of people not yet jaded by too much media. The scene in which the townspeople see the crime staged, is an exciting sequence, complete with angry cries from viewers who insist, "It didn't happen like that!"
The pasty, yet tall and striking Bettany may be one of our best young actors, capable of playing a great range of parts. He cleverly pulled off a fun Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, and the vicious title character in Gangster No. 1. The always-great Dafoe summons an intensity here for an otherwise middling role, even performing a couple of jaw-dropping yoga positions. In addition, McGuigan has assembled a great collection of thespians for his troupe, including Brian Cox (the original Hannibal in Manhunter) and the lovely, heavy-lidded Gina McKee, best known as Hugh Grant's wheelchair-bound friend in Notting Hill.
The film's end, and the capture of the true culprit, naturally come with a kind of anticlimax. The reveal doesn't pack much of a surprise, but the movie instead raises larger questions. Who decides what's good or bad, and the degrees thereof? The Reckoning could have played more with these many fascinating themes, but just planting those seeds makes it a challenging and thought-provoking film, and a welcome relief to a dry season.