Religious (dis)order

According to the narrator of Christopher Smith’s latest genre derivative Black Death, the plague is estimated to have wiped out around 50% of the European population. When people around you are dying off at an alarming rate and you can in all reasonability be next, you want answers: why is this happening? In Medieval England – the year of our Lord 1348, to be precise – the young monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), questioning whether the plague is possibly some sort of punishment for their sins (“but for what sin?”), volunteers to lead a group of the bishop’s knights to a remote village “across the marshes”. 

Apparently, this particular village is unaffected by the plague. Instead of instilling some gratitude that at least someone somewhere is free from the disease, it elicits suspicion: why that village in particular? What do they do or have that keeps them safe from the plague? According to the leader of the knights, Ulric (Sean Bean), a necromancer is the reason for the village's proliferation. And within Christianised Britain, necromancy and any other pagan activity and witchery will result in death to those who transgress against God.

So off go the monk and the knights – including the film’s best secondary character, the serious minded older knight Wolfstan (John Lynch) - to fight what they believe is the good fight. As everyone who’s ever seen a medieval epic or adventure knows, battles, dismemberment and death await on their quest. We know that the knights’ numbers will dwindle, and that much will be sacrificed on their way to the mysterious village.

But while Black Death hooks you with its premise and the promise of swords clashing and heads rolling, at a certain point the film becomes a surprisingly sombre tale of faith, religious indoctrination and the evils that men do in the name of their deity. It’s not as weighty or innovative as Valhalla Rising, as it still maintains certain genre conventions. Yet Black Death’s final half hour opens up interpretations on how certain events actually proceeded for the characters and the audience, which contributes to the film’s overall scepticism in the belief in the supernatural. In this sense, it’s less an epic than many other medieval actioners, and also more.

Christopher Smith is an exciting minor filmmaker, ‘minor’ in the sense that he hasn’t yet broken out into mainstream cinema even though his movies are all genre films. As Black Death is ostensibly a period adventure, Triangle was a female-driven thriller while Creep was a horror feature. But there’s always something different to Smith’s films, which makes them worth seeking out. Shot in Germany, Black Death looks beautiful and features convincing set designs, everyone making the most of what was surely a very limited budget . And it has Carice van Houten, the gorgeous spy in Zwartboek, whom I failed to recognise. 

Black Death is brutal and grisly, as befits its type, yet contains a single scene of battle. The film’s interesting contradictions make for absorbing viewing in spite of some unimaginative dialogue.

Fear comes in waves (tagline)

Image: www.rottentomatoes.com

Christopher Smith, known for writing and directing arterial spray-infused thrillers such as "Creep" (2004) and "Severance" (2006), moves into more psychologically murky waters with the ship-set "Triangle" (2010). It is difficult to discuss this film without going into spoilers, so here's the basic plot and my essential thoughts on the film.


"Triangle" opens with single mom Jess (Melissa George) in a hurry to get somewhere, having seemingly been delayed by her autistic son. After dropping him off at school, Jess joins potential lover Greg (Michael Dorman) on his yacht along with some of his friends and a young man he's taken under his wing, Victor (Liam Hemsworth). It's not long before the trouble begins: the wind drops, and then a storm capsizes the yacht. Happy to board a ship that passes their way, they believe they're saved, except for Jess who is clearly unsettled by the fact that there's no-one else on the ship. It's not long before people start dying. 


"Triangle" is clever but not as much as it would like to be. It is seldom tense or scary, but the film looks great and Smith makes good use of contrasting the blue and white openness of the sea with the dark, confined interiors of the ship. Although one can figure out what's going on without too much difficulty, the film is at least somewhat unpredictable in how it reveals the dynamics aboard the ship. The problem is that post-"Sixth Sense", many people, including myself, go into a thriller already anticipating a big twist of some sort, and spend the movie trying to figure out what's going on, looking to see how the puppet master pulls the strings. Few thrillers prove wholly satisfying, and in the end we have movies like "Triangle" that can be classified as almost not shooting itself in the foot. It doesn't help that even before the action is really afoot, the film over explains its thinking with too many overt mythological references. 


Now, to go into some soft spoiler territory.


Those mythological references I speak about above? They mostly concern Sisyphus, that unfortunate fellow who was damned to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got near the top. What is a man to do? Start over. Repeat for infinity. This provides the film's narrative macro structure, which finds Jess in a position where she has to perform certain actions to get to an apparent end, only to fail and start over again. Structuring the film like this is a blessing and a curse: it makes for a different type of thriller that's more cerebral than most thrillers but the novelty wears off eventually. The film's plot does not hold up under scrutiny.


Still, as flawed as it is, "Triangle" is much better than most gore-obsessed horrors that come out these days, and it gives new meaning to genre term Final Girl - traditionally used to indicate the lone female survivor in a typical horror movie - by emphasizing how alone this lone figure truly is.