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Jul. 2nd, 2010 06:45 amA quick movie recommendation:
I don’t know if Black Death has made its way to North American shores yet, but it’s worth seeing.
The year is 1348 (a very bad year, as medievalists know), and a devilish plague is sweeping the land. Sean Bean stars as a witchfinder searching for the necromancer responsible. Eddie Redmayne stars as a monk who agrees to be his guide.
The film is well-acted, and as grim as any movie set in 1348 ought to be. That said, I love stories that do interesting things with genre conventions, so the film had me at “fantasy quest meets bubonic plague!” For 2/3rds of the movie the script does an excellent job of walking the tightrope of Todorov’s Fantastic. Near the conclusion, it comes down more heavily on one side of the genre line than the other, and I would have preferred for things to remain extremely ambiguous. But we can’t have everything, and Sean Bean + Plague is pretty sweet.
I don’t know if Black Death has made its way to North American shores yet, but it’s worth seeing.
The year is 1348 (a very bad year, as medievalists know), and a devilish plague is sweeping the land. Sean Bean stars as a witchfinder searching for the necromancer responsible. Eddie Redmayne stars as a monk who agrees to be his guide.
The film is well-acted, and as grim as any movie set in 1348 ought to be. That said, I love stories that do interesting things with genre conventions, so the film had me at “fantasy quest meets bubonic plague!” For 2/3rds of the movie the script does an excellent job of walking the tightrope of Todorov’s Fantastic. Near the conclusion, it comes down more heavily on one side of the genre line than the other, and I would have preferred for things to remain extremely ambiguous. But we can’t have everything, and Sean Bean + Plague is pretty sweet.
