The Reel Review
After being struck by a car while backpacking through the English countryside, a mysterious young woman is taken to the driver’s family estate to recover from amnesia. There, she is haunted by individuals who look a lot like figures portrayed in a recently discovered church that was buried during the Black Death in the 1300s. Christina Ricci stars in this 2002 supernatural horror loosely based on the legend of The Wandering Jew.
Shot with flash cuts and quick zooms that were popular in the early 2000s, The Gathering starts off with a promising, spooky premise about cursed souls forced to witness gruesome moments in history. Unfortunately, that story goes adrift about halfway through the film, shoved aside for a bizarre laundry list of nonsensical subplots, mysterious non-sequiturs and a plot that clearly had some key elements edited out of the film’s final cut.
It’s a shame, because Ricci and co-star Ioin Gruffudd are fun to watch and The Gathering, while not even the slightest bit scary, is a solid looking production from director Brian Gilbert (Wilde, Tom & Viv) that had the potential to be at least unnerving had its screenwriter Anthony Horowitz (Alex Rider, Foyle’s War) figured out how to pull together his many concepts into a coherent story.
REEL FACTS
• The Wandering Jew is a mythical immortal man whose legend began to spread throughout Europe in the 1200s. As the legend goes, a Jew who taunted Jesus Christ on the way to the Crucifixion was cursed to walk the Earth until the Second Coming.
• Following this film, Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd (Titanic) starred as Mister Fantastic in 2005’s Fantastic Four and as Tony Blair in Oliver Stone’s 2008 biopic W, about former U.S. President George W. Bush. Gruffudd’s most recent film was the 2020 action/thriller Ava, starring Jessica Chastain.
• Most of The Gathering was filmed in Northleach, England
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