[rating=3]
“In the year of our lord 1348” you can almost taste the plague ridden corpses. Swollen, black and teeming with rats, humanity is rotting into the ground one peasant at a time. Has God forsaken his children or is Lucifer expanding his empire of flies and filth into the garden of mankind?
“God’s grip on his flock has loosened,” states Ulric, knight and envoy to the Bishop. Ulric is part zealot, part pragmatist; he knows the true power of religion is not spiritual but its ability to keep the uneducated from revolting against the noble class he is part of. Without God to believe in, what is to stop them taking revenge on the privileged?
Ulric and his mercenaries, veterans of the Battle of Crecy, where the slaughter of knights by common infantry heralded the death of chivalry, are charged with capturing a necromancer said to keep a village safe from the pestilence by demonic means. Their guide is novice monk Osmund who sees Ulric’s mission as a call from God.
Iron Maiden in tow, the wretched band of brothers’ odyssey to the village is a land-based version of “Aguirre, the wrath of God.” The stench of death threatens to drown the camera as they travel deeper into the heart of darkness, with Ulric’s fervour burning more sickly the closer they get. “We have the tools, we have the will-we journey into hell.”
On the way to Ulric’s quarry, director Christopher Smith handles some nasty battle scenes with throat-ripping aplomb. He also messes with our expectations of what Ulric and his men should find in this sanctuary. By the time the mercenaries reach the village they are a motley crew of walking dead who look like disease-ridden carcasses, the very thing we would expect them to encounter on reaching the end of their quest.
Instead they find something more unfathomable, something more at home in Michael Caine’s much-overlooked The Last Valley or the cult Wicker Man. How will these instruments of “13 centuries of control and intimidation” react when their faith is tested to the limit? Will Ulric’s men succumb to the enclosed evil or act as bubonic suicide bombers in the name of almighty God?
Black Death, although uneven in structure (the village section seems rushed) is an intelligent meditation on the barbarity of organised religion when threatened by “heretical” alternatives. Smith’s movie can sit comfortably next to The Witch Finder General and proves after Creep, the excellent Severance, and Triangle he is a skilled practitioner in the dark arts of the horror genre.