If you’re telling a story that involves an old priest, a young priest and a possessed girl and you aren’t The Exorcist, you have taken on the kind of challenge that would terrify Beelzebub himself. Director David Midell has made a decent attempt on it here, and if the result ultimately feels like just another wannabe, he has at least assembled an interesting cast to stab at hell’s heart.
This film is based, we are told repeatedly, on the most thoroughly documented exorcisms in American history. Dan Stevens plays the scribe, young Father Joseph Steiger, while Al Pacino is the old priest, Father Theophilus Riesinger, a name so perfect it had to be real. Steiger, who has recently suffered a loss in the family, is reluctant to take charge of the disturbed Emma (Abigail Cowen). Priest or no, he’s a modern guy and sure that her problem must be psychological rather than demonic, but he is forced to question that assumption by the jump-scares — sorry, “phenomena” — that surround the exorcism.
The film can’t quite decide whether it believes in demons or not.
Emma is housed in a convent, so the resident nuns join the exorcism effort, doing most of the work, suffering most of the horror and getting little of the credit, as is the way of these things. There’s an interesting undertone of patriarchal dismissal in both priests’ attitudes to the women at times, though not to the extent of making them unsympathetic to modern audiences in a way that might have been interesting, nor in making the nuns central to the story. But worse, the film can’t quite decide whether it believes in demons or not. There’s a lot of chat about the psychological roots of Emma’s distress, and Steiger’s role as a sceptic seems primed to offer a could-go-either-way take on the supernatural, much like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. But ultimately it comes down on the side of the macabre without much hedging, which feels like a missed opportunity, and forces everyone involved to confront their own demons. Literally.
Still, this does have some entertaining performances. Stevens holds the entire thing together in his increasingly horrified reactions, while Pacino hams it up with a thick accent, fright-wig and beatific smile. Cowen, as the possessee, goes through the physical wringer, and if she’s not quite as unnerving as a Jennifer Carpenter or Linda Blair, she’s more than creepy enough. It just could have used a stronger script to really play all the angles, and find a way to stand out from the cassocked crowd.