Black Death is the feel bad movie of the year, a film with an unrelentingly bleak view of humankind’s barbaric nature and the notion that, no matter what your creed, violence only ever begets more violence.

In the year 1348, the black plague is ravaging Europe. The only things more numerous than the bloated bodies littering the streets are the rats dining on the carcasses. A young priest named Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), crushed by the guilt of a pure but forbidden love with a village girl, volunteers to aid a pious knight named Ulric (Sean Bean) and his band of mercenary warriors to find a remote village rumored to be immune to the plague. Given his reeling faith and the sinful state of his flesh, Osmond is attracted to Ulric’s staunch and unwavering piety (despite the fact that the head of Osmund’s order warns him that Ulrich is far more dangerous than any pestilence).

Once on the road, Osmund, who is brought along for his knowledge of the marshlands through which they must trudge, learns that he has been told only half the truth. There is also talk of the village sheltering a necromancer who consorts with Satan and raises the dead. Ulric and his men intend on capturing or killing the sorcerer and putting to the sword all who defy the Church. Upon arriving at the village, however, they find nothing but an idyllic utopia led by Langiva (Carice van Houten), an inscrutable but gracious host. However, as the men quickly learn, things in the village aren’t exactly as they appear (think The Wicker Man).

If you were to predict the message of Black Death based only on the trailer, you would come away convinced that it is an angry and vicious atheist attack of Christianity for the manner in which faith has been historically used as a bloody and vicious bludgeon on those it opposes. As with Osmund, you would be only half right. Turns out screenwriter Dario Poloni and director Christopher Smith (who comes from a horror background and suffuses the film with buckets of blood and hacked limbs) have little love for fundamentalism of any stripe. There is no one without sin in the cynical Black Death.

Much as last year’s excellent, but equally extremely violent Valhalla Rising was a rumination on the consequences of blind faith, Black Death finds fundamentalist fervor (the sort that is willing to commit murder while calling it the purgation of evil) and unbridled paganism to be equally indictable. Ultimately both sides resort to a gory descent into madness. All roads lead to hell. Just as God’s will can easily be perverted into barbarism with just the slightest nudge, so too any devotion that loses sight of basic humanity. Even God himself falls under the film’s exacting scrutiny, as many of the townsfolk Ulric and Osmond come across see the millions of plague dead as divine retribution for some unknown transgression.

Director Smith does a fine job of mirroring his narrative pessimism with an unflinching visual presentation of mud, muck, smoke and filth. The suffocating dread he evokes, broken up only by bouts of disembowelings and decapitations, is a pervasive and effective motif—brutal, austere, oppressive and grim. There is little to no hope to be found here. Black Death transposes 14th century ignorance atop 21st century advances and wonders if religious self-importance and arrogance has changed even a whit in 700 years.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Christopher Smith
Starring: Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Carice van Houten, Kimberley Nixon, John Lynch, Tim McInnerny
Rated R for strong brutal violence, and some language.
Running Time: 97 minutes