The Reckoning

Director: John V. Soto
Starring: Jonathan La Paglia, Viva Bianca, Luke Hemsworth, Hanna Mangan Lawrence, Alex Williams
Distributor: Other
Runtime: 86 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2014

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Rating notes: Violence, Coarse Language, Drug References, Sex Scene

Reckoning always seems to include some kind of calling to account and justice being done. And that is the case here, although much of the justice is avenging justice, vindictive justice.

An initial focus is on flashback memories of two sisters who are devoted to each other, together on a beach. We are then introduced to a Perth detective, played by Jonathan La Paglia, woken early in the morning to be told that one of his police partners has been shot.

So, on one level, this is a police investigation and detective story, trying to find the killer of the policeman and discovering a long trail of killings over several days. This involves quite some footwork for the detective and his partner (and there are some domestic complications concerning the detective’s wife and daughters in the presence of his female partner). But, he discovers a memory stick in the pocket of the dead policeman and find some video, a young girl (one of the sisters we have seen at the beginning) saying that she has little time to live, is making a documentary about her search for all those responsible for her sister being high on drugs and being killed in a hit and run accident.

As might be expected, there are several twists in the narrative, not everybody being what they seem to be.

However, what makes the narrative somewhat different is the religious dimension. Rachel, the girl on the quest, who was accompanied by a young man who has just been released from a mental institution and has no qualms about violence, is particularly religious, even going to a church and insisting that the reluctant priest marry the couple instantly. She seems to have an unlimited number of quotations in her memory from Old Testament and New Testament, to put as captions in her documentary, relating to each of the guilty parties that she discovers.

(Although there is a script editor credited, when a quotations from Romans 13:4 is discovered and one of the officers in the police precinct doesn’t know what it means, Jonathan La Paglia actually says it is a book of the Old Testament – and soon after, on screen, there is a quote about those who commit heinous crimes getting not their just deserts but there just desserts!. Maybe not too many people noticed, but they are disappointing slips in a rather polished production.)

It all leads up to a confrontation, some revelations that we may not have been expecting, a sad ending for Rachel and an uncertain ending for the detective.