The Exorcism – A Nonsensical Misfire

Coming off of last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist, a sleeper hit with a sequel in development, Russell Crowe’s casting in another, completely different exorcism-related film became that much more baffling for obvious reasons (with the biggest being simple confusion between films). Just different enough to avoid confusion with his previous exorcism film, The Exorcism takes the subgenre in an interesting direction with a promising enough premise. However, it fails to do anything remotely interesting with it. A relatively short film, clocking in at around the 90-minute mark, that running time only worked as a crutch. Seemingly operating with little sense of urgency, it takes far too long to get going and once it does, the film gets bogged down by far too much to the point that it is never quite clear what is going on. When it’s not clear what is going on, there’s a barrier preventing understanding and when there’s no understanding, there is little reason to care and that is essentially where the film’s issues ultimately lie. Though Crowe and the other performances were fine, they are truly let down by a horrendous script that fails to balance tones and deliver a coherent story. Filling gaps in character and story development with derivative plot beats, it never had a chance.

The Exorcism follows Anthony Miller (Crowe), a troubled actor whose latest role as a priest in an exorcism-related horror film brought on some unusual behavior on his part. Stirring up some past trauma, along with the grief after losing his wife that led him to addiction and his strained relationship with his estranged daughter Lee (Simpkins). Now back together under the same roof, Anthony got her a job on the same film. Watching her father and believing him to be triggered and slipping, she wondered if his past destructive behavior was coming back but was that it? Anyone could have probably guessed that things were never going to be that simple as that as the film presented an alternate theory by introducing another potential force at play. Over the course of the film, as Anthony continued to spiral, it straddled that line and appeared uninterested in ever making clear which scenario to be the case. Only being cast in the film after the tragic death of the previous actor cast in the role, there was definitely something going on. However, what that was never went further than that.

Resting solely on the arc of the relationship between Anthony and Lee as a means to hopefully pull audiences into the story, it fails miserably at doing so. Both characters are so woefully underdeveloped, the cliches that served as the foundation of their father-daughter relationship were not nearly enough to make them worth caring about on any level. This merely leaves audiences at a distance as they are left to watch a series of scenes where things happen with little emotional impact as the result of Anthony and Lee’s intended arcs were left fully unfulfilled. Time that could have been spent fleshing out both characters was instead used more on the film’s muddled how, fumbling miserably while trying to make sense of everything that was going on and create an engaging narrative as a whole. Meanwhile, following suit, the dialog didn’t do the film any favors. Choosing to play it straight, some of it comes off as unintentionally funny. Similarly, its scares are nothing special either and were just the standard jump scares that everyone has seen countless times before.

As mentioned, the performances were fine, all doing the best they could with the material. The Exorcism could have been so much more than it was but Crowe still gives it a sense of credibility. As opposed to The Pope’s Exorcist, he plays it straight, however, it doesn’t work here. The plot never really got off the ground here so the role could have evolved into something more worthwhile but we’ll never know what it could have been. Simpkins, as Lee, is the only other prominent role which essentially was to steer Anthony forward as a counterbalance. Though she had decent chemistry with Crowe in the few meaningful scenes they spent together, those scenes didn’t amount to all that much.

At the end of the day, The Exorcism squanders a decent premise, packing too much nonsense story within its short runtime and underpinning it with a thin and incoherent script.

still courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.