Black Death

BLACK DEATH Directed by Christopher Smith. Starring Sean Bean, Carice van Houten, Eddie Redmayne, David Warner, Kimberley Nixon, John Lynch 15A cert, Cineworld, Dublin, 102 min

IT'S ALWAYS nice to see a promising director come good. After a fitful series of horror films (the passable Creep, the awful Severance, the fascinating Triangle), young Christopher Smith delivers a real blood-drenched, sinew-snapping corker with this medieval shocker.

Following a cadre of ruthless Christian missionaries as they hack their way through Bergmanesque plague-lands, Black Deathtips its hat to a trio of British pictures from the 1970s. The pestilent mud seems to have been wiped from the boots of Witchfinder Generaland Blood on Satan's Claw.The closing pagan rituals remind us of those from The Wicker Man. It has, however, been so long since this vein of period horror was in vogue that the film feels totally fresh (if anything so covered in boils can be thus described).

The fragile Eddie Redmayne stars as a monk who, unknown to a council of elders that includes the mighty David Warner, has been carrying on a relationship with a local wench. When a sword- wielding Sean Bean type (played by the actual Sean Bean) stomps into town asking for directions to a marsh-bound village, Brother Eddie, spying a way to meet his beloved, volunteers to act as a guide.

This proves to be a mistake. The armed men, who blithely slaughter a suspected witch on their travels, believe that the village – suspiciously free of plague – is sheltering a necromancer. So it proves and, in the form of weird Carice van Houten, she demonstrates few inclinations towards mercy.

The final destination does, it must be said, look a little too much like a model community from a recently opened medieval theme park. But, for the most part, Smith, working from a tight script by Dario Poloni, does a good job of maintaining a convincingly bleak, slime-covered ambience.

Only occasionally at home to dark humour, Black Deathsomehow manages to make something quite serious of a story that could easily totter into the preposterous.

Indeed, you could even argue that Black Deathis actually about something. If the picture has a lesson, it is that all forms of faith, whether optimistically new age or institutionally conformist, ultimately lead to intolerance and irrationality.

The film plays, in other words, like an emanation from the militant wing of the Dawkins Tendency. Only it’s more fun than that description suggests.