The Reaping (2007)

Katherine Morrissey, a former missionary turned professional debunker, arrives in a Louisiana swamp town to explain away a river of blood, and the film spends its first act treating skepticism as a plausible vocation. Hilary Swank carries the investigation with a straight back and a clipboard. Idris Elba stands beside her as the colleague, competent and unremarked upon. Nobody in the screenplay feels compelled to make a point of either of them, which in 2007 was simply how a mid-budget horror picture was staffed. The picture is not trying to instruct us about anything except the ancient friction between evidence and belief, and even that friction is mostly a delivery system for frogs, lice, and boils.

The plagues arrive on schedule, faithful to Exodus and indifferent to the environment. No one suggests the cattle are dying of anything so modern as emissions, and no one proposes a carbon tax to appease the Almighty. The theology is antique satanic-cult material, a town of firstborns who traded God for a swamp and a sacrifice, and it resists every urge to update itself for contemporary audiences. The woman who drives the plot does so because the plot requires an expert, not because the screenplay has an argument to make about her sex. Her pregnancy, when it lands in the final minutes, is a punchline of biblical proportion, not a statement about anything.

So we have a competently mounted piece of religious schlock, panned on arrival, aged into a curiosity. It lectures us only about faith, and only because faith is the engine of its plot. Its cultural footprint is faint. It exists to fill ninety-nine minutes and to keep the Louisiana film economy ticking after a hurricane. There are worse reasons for a movie to exist, and few duller executions.