Sean Bean Starring In Period Adventure Film Black Death

Photos have surfaced of Black Death, starring Sean Bean and Carice van Houten. The project isn't totally new — it is shooting now, as evidenced by the photos — but has gone more or less unreported. Christopher Smith is directing the story, which features Bean as a knight named Ulric who is scouring the bubonic plague-ravaged countryside for Langiva, a woman who conjures the dead back to life. Carice van Houten, who was so excellent in Black Book (and barely seen as Tom Cruise's wife in Valkyrie) is playing Langiva, which is enough to secure my ticket.

Sean Bean fansite Bean-land has loads of images, which also feature co-stars Eddie Redmayne and Kimberly Nixon. Based on costumes and sets alone the film looks like a traditional movie vision of medieval life. With a title like Black Death and a plot that features necromancy, we can hope for a few fun, gooey scenes that take advantage of the dirty setting filled with rag-clothed extras.

Christopher Smith isn't  yet a name known to most, but he's getting there. His 2006 flim Severance was a hell of a lot of fun; it's easy to call it Hostel meets The Office, but if that gets you to watch it I'm not ashamed to be a little bit reductive. His previous film, 2004's Creep, is significantly weaker, but has a great performance by Sean Harris as the creep of the title. Smith just had the film Triangle, which tracks a group of yacht passengers who encounter havoc at sea, at Cannes, but it has yet to find a distributor.