(2010. dir: Christopher Smith) This is the nightmare version of the Hobbit. A young monk (Eddie Redmayne) embarks on an adventure through a plague-stricken landscape, guiding an embassage of God's soldiers (led by Sean Bean, a Boromir calcified in his own darkness) on a mission to investigate reports of a town beyond the marsh over which death holds no sway. The constant threat of what appears to be a divine genocide sweeping across the land brings the worst out of its denizens: even good men give in to cowardice and become immune to empathy, while the worst become witch-burners, predatory outlaws, blood-crazed fanatics.
It is advertised as "an occult thriller", but its horror lies in man's continuing cruelty to man. The supernatural element, which is almost overpowering sometimes, comes from the unseen, exulting presence of a God so malevolent he is exterminating his people. The power of Smith's presentation of his world is that God is sometimes felt as an impartial, amoral, balancing force, while at others you can almost hear Him cackling with self-satisified delight at the ingenuity of His torments.
The acting is uniformly wonderful, from David Warner as an abbott fighting theodical thoughts, to Bean, an actor who is always at his magnificent best when exploring how nobility and tyranny can exist within the same breast. Redmayne is perfect in an introspective role which becomes extraordinarily complex by the astonishing ending, and John Lynch is utterly marvellous as our everyman narrator, a veteran soldier returned from France, a man who has faced the darkness of this world head-on while managing to keep hold of a sense of honor, and even he finds himself befuddled by the horrors around him. The final words of his narration, the melancholy optimism of them, are, in context, heart-rending.
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