52926: The Exorcism
Confession time: I went to Catholic high school. I took four years of theology classes and sat through I don’t even know how many masses in the school auditorium, and it was fine. There was nothing overly traumatizing about it, which seems odd, considering just how much Catholicism has contributed to horror in our mass media. There’s so much of it, in fact, that some of my friends wrote a book about Catholic horror on television. Why does the Catholic Church offer such a rich vein for horror? Well, it could be that the vein is full of blood. From Jesus’ crucifixion to communion, from lions to the martyrs, the Catholic Church is bursting with blood. It also includes a cloistered side, with plenty of dark corners, perfect for hiding monsters of all sorts.
One of the most enduring types of horror to come out of those dark corners, other than sexual abuse, is demonic possession. It is a time-honored and profitable genre, filled with classics and embarrassments, and everything between. The latest big-name entry in the field, landing squarely in the “everything between” category, is The Exorcism, directed by Joshua John Miller from a script by Miller and M. A. Fortin. Before I get into the weeds, let me just say that this movie is worth watching, despite some problematic elements. The performances are engrossing, the story is good if you don’t think about it too hard, and it manages to deliver some lasting frights and memorable imagery.
Okay. Here’s the rest, with as few spoilers as possible.
The Exorcism is actually the second of two possession films starring Russell Crowe to be released in the span of 14 months. And they’re not related. The Exorcism, which was actually filmed before last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist, is a dutifully spooky tale of an over-the-hill actor with a penchant for problematic drinking, who attempts to rehabilitate his career (and his relationship with his daughter) by starring in a remake of The Exorcist. It is fair to say that Crowe inhabits the character. He is paunchy, he is slow. His words come with effort, his face with gin blossoms. We discover early in the film that he crawled into a bottle while his wife died of cancer, emotionally and physically abandoning her and their 16 year-old daughter. He has since crawled (mostly) out of the bottle, but is still haunted by his failures as a husband, father, and man.
He is, to put it simply, a man battling his own demons.
Ultimately, films about demonic possession work because they’re funhouse mirrors for our own fears and failings. Like, remember that time when the kid gets possessed, and then they get a creepy monster voice and they start laying into the priest about how he couldn’t save some other kid or something like that? Remember that? Yeah, you do, because it’s in every one of these movies. The monster forces the hero to look at him or herself in the worst, least generous way possible. It’s a crucible, and it makes us think about our own flaws and shame. I think these movies continue to appeal to us because of that shaming; it’s a bloodletting for our psyches, a masochistic purgation that almost always comes with the banishing of the demon, and our own demons, back to hell. At least until the next time. But I digress.
Crowe’s protagonist, not-so-subtly named Anthony Miller, manages to land this career-revivifying role not in spite of his demons, but because of them. In a terrible, and I suspect accurate, depiction of Anthony’s audition, we’re treated to an amuse bouche of the many ways Anthony sucks. His delivery of the lines is terrible, emotionless, and seemingly confused. (side note: it is probably difficult for an actor to portray bad acting well, but Crowe does it quite aptly throughout the film) The director, Pete, who is played with devastating shittiness by Adam Goldberg, then steps in and starts picking apart Anthony’s life and all the ways he is a terrible person, as well as hinting that perhaps Anthony experienced his own childhood trauma as an altar boy. This dissection of Anthony is painful to watch. Exchanges like these make me glad I work in marketing. No one has ever tried to dredge up the worst moments of my life because they thought it would help improve the company’s blog traffic, but I guess showbiz is different.
Anyhoo. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the production of the new The Exorcist has somehow invoked the presence of an “actual” demon, one perhaps even more evil than online sports betting, and it starts fucking with Anthony’s head almost immediately. He starts doing lots of creepy shit, putting out big possessed-by-a-demon energy, but mostly in a sort of fugue state with chanting in Latin. Almost all of his creepiness is geared towards making his now 17 year-old daughter, Lee, played by Ryan Simpkins, feel unsafe in their home.
There are some genuinely creepy moments, some jump scares, and some scenes that had me asking “does Lee not have any friends she can stay with?” Unfortunately, Anthony’s demon-assisted behavior is not the only creepiness Lee must contend with. She’s not only forced into the role of PA on the film-within-the-film, and forced to listen as the director and producers talk about how terrible her father is (and, yikes, he’s God awful), she enters into a super problematic relationship with one of the other stars of the movie, Blake, a successful singer and actor played by Chloe Bailey . I’m not sure why the producers thought this was a cool idea. Aside from the workplace power disparity, Lee is a high school student who has to contend with a demonic father. Let the child deal with her shit, Blake, and maybe go date someone your own age.
Rounding out the cast is David Hyde Pierce as Father Conor, the on-set Catholicism expert. His performance as a priest with a Ph.D. in psychiatry was warm, knowing, and deeply weary, which is kind of what you’d expect from a priest who actually invests himself in trying to make a difference in the lives of others. He’s also 100% the “old priest” from the “I need a young priest and an old priest” quote, and you know from the jump that things will go badly for him.
Father Conor is the sort of priest, and person, who will do anything and everything he can to help someone, whether they deserve it or not. And, to be clear, Anthony does not deserve to be helped. He has welcomed his demon(s) back into his life, repeatedly, just in the few months of time that the film covers. He has endangered his child, himself, the people he works with, over and over. When the movie started, he had already abandoned his family to chase booze, harder drugs, and other women. He sucks. Even on his best days, when he’s trying his hardest to be a better human, he still sucks. And yet, we know that Father Conor will destroy himself to try and save Anthony, simply because he can. He will gather his old bones, wrap himself in his vestments and his faith, and go out one last time to fight against evil for the soul of one sinner.
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