Black Death

Black Death (2010) is Christopher Smith's bleak medieval horror, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The plague is gutting fourteenth-century England when word reaches the Church of a marshland village the pestilence never touched.

Novice monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) volunteers to guide the knight Ulric (Sean Bean) and his band of soldiers to that settlement. The Church smells witchcraft: someone there is said to raise the dead and hold the sickness at bay. The trek through rotting forests and burned-out hamlets is grim enough, but the real dread waits past the village gate, where the enigmatic Langiva (Carice van Houten) holds sway. Here questions of faith get answered with the rack, not with prayer.

Smith skips the costume-epic gloss for a hard parable about fanaticism, with no clean heroes on either side. The mud, the blood and the moral dead end come without softening. It suits anyone who wants severe folk horror in the vein of The Witch and can take an ending that offers no comfort. Stream Black Death (2010) online on iFILM.