Black Death (2010)

“I believe hunting necromancers and demons serves men more than it serves God."

This film seems appropriate right now, does it not? Personally I'm not scared for my own safety, really, nor that of either Mrs Llamastrangler or Little Miss Llamastrangler. We are all young and healthy. I'm more worried about my retired parents, the likelihood that at least someone I know is probably going to die when our current plague washes over us properly. And, given our circumstances, I've no idea what the Hell we're going to do for childcare if... when the schools close.

Anyway, this is an oddly redolent film and it's an act of defiant black humour to blog it. I suspect that, within weeks or days, it will become tasteless. Some readers, I fear, will already find it so, but let us not be too quick to cast aside the consolations of black humour.

I fear also that this film is rubbish. Oh, it's well-made in its impressive German locations and the cast- led splendidly by Carice van Houten, a very young Eddie Redmayne and the ever-doomed Sean Bean, is magnificent. The plot rattles on nicely with a nice twist at the end with Langiva only having drugged Averill, with Osmund the one who killed her. But it's rubbish nonetheless. I don't mind historical inaccuracies, especially in the name of artistic licence, but this film makes no attempt to research or approximate the England of 1348. The opening narration refers anachronistically to a "germ". All the characters have cod-Anglo-Saxon personal names which would be centuries out of use. And, of course, while mediaeval people lived in a world of superstition, they were not barbaric enough to burn women as witches until at least a century after this. And we may get an amusing tour of the tropes of plague- the obligatory flagellants and plague doctors, but the latter belong to the seventeenth century.

Worst of all, while I love the scene in which the encroaching Christian part is drugged and seized like Vortigern at the Night of the Long Knives, the idea of a whole village renouncing Christianity in favour not even of paganism but what seems to be atheism is not even slightly plausible. A pity; change the details and set the film in a fantasy world and it would be a nicely told and splendidly violent tale. But when historical inaccuracies are this fundamental they are not a small detail but a major flaw. Sadly, this is rubbish.