The Reckoning (2025) Review

Opening Saturday’s lineup at the Black Sunday Film Festival was Alex Breaux’s Franco-American psychological thriller The Reckoning, a slow-burn familial drama that unravels into an all too understandable deadly rampage, loosely based on Guy de Maupassant’s novel Pierre et Jean.

Screenwriter Michael Weaver stars as Brian, a burned out middle-aged man whose life has passed him by since he became the sole carer of his mother Laura (Kristin Griffith), who appears to be suffering from dementia, and no longer recognises her son. Meanwhile, his brother Nick (Quincy Dunn-Baker) is the high-flying success story that every down on their luck sibling is traditionally plagued with, and the only member of the family their mother seems to remember or give a damn about. The sibling relationship is strained by domestic and financial imbalance, and Nick’s lack of consideration for the family in the face of his mother’s favouritism just twists the blade.

Their father has recently died, and they observe his will by travelling to a chateau in France to scatter his ashes, where the struggling family unit is pushed to its limits within a few short days, all while something spooky may or may not be complicating matters further. It’s your classic ghosts-or-insanity setup, mostly carried by Weaver’s painfully relatable performance as an ordinary man being slowly but surely driven to the end of his tether.

The bulk of the story is really a family drama, one that holds your attention and pulls on your heartstrings, while introducing a mystery to be solved. Despite the vast spaces of the chateau and its grounds, the cinematography lends the setting a suffocating force, while keen editing, sound mixing and direction put you in the troubled mind of our tragic hero. There is no particular sense of build-up to an inevitable explosion, more a realistic chugging along of a tired and broken man until things reach a sudden boiling point.

Breaux’s visionary direction is a perfect partner for Weaver’s expert performance, while Dunn-Baker hits all the right notes as the asshole brother.

Dipping its toe occasionally into horror waters while maintaining a strong stance in psychological thrills, The Reckoning is quite the accomplishment for a crew of 18 working with as many days on set.

Movie Rating:

The Reckoning trailer