I watched this film in the presence of two small children who were absorbed in Ozzy: The Great Furscape on a Samsung tablet. Initially I was a bit jumpy in case the brats removed their headphones and heard unearthly demoniacal screams emanating from my side of the room, and unfortunately, this is precisely what transpired. Unexpectedly, however, those screams were produced not by the laptop I was watching the movie on, but by me, as I bore witness to Russell Crowe, for the second time in the space of 12 months, portraying an exorcist on screen, and giving voice to lines such as “the devil doesn’t like jokes.” Which perhaps clarifies the Prince of Darkness’ likely position on this particular movie.
Crowe plays the jovial and rather rotund Father Amorth, a becassocked conman who has somehow made a viable career from travelling around and casting out Satan’s minions from the bodies and minds of the possessed. Amorth’s talents are required at a remote and dilapidated Spanish abbey, which is being renovated by a young and profoundly annoying American family that has recently been traumatised by the loss of their patriarch in a car accident. While digging, the incompetent and probably uninsured construction crew inadvertently releases a long-buried demon, which takes possession of the family’s youngest member, 12-year-old E.T. lookalike Henry. Classic Exorcist tropes ensue, with Henry tied to the bed, groping his mother’s breasts, using lots of profanity, eating live birds, and making obscene apocalyptic pronouncements, though the extent to which this behaviour differs from that of an average 21st century North American teenager is of course open to discussion.
Word of these dark happenings reaches the Pope, who finds the situation sufficiently disturbing to dispatch Amorth to Spain, apparently by motor scooter, to expel the demon that has possessed Henry. Amorth and Father Tomas, the uncommonly handsome local priest, soon discover that the abbey is a place of great evil, built on the site of a mass grave of victims of the Spanish Inquisition. They also learn that the Inquisition itself was set up in the 15th century by a friar who was possessed by Asmodeus, the demon that is currently inhabiting Henry. Asmodeus wants to pull the same trick again by possessing Amorth and infiltrating the Vatican, apparently having not gotten the memo that, in the intervening five centuries, the Holy See has declined in power and authority to around roughly the same status as the British Conservative Party. Sam Altman would have made for a better target, though in that case, of course, Asmodeus would first have had to evict the current tenant.
I can’t really do justice to how ridiculous the final third of this film is because it quite literally comprises a Catholic buddy cop movie in which Amorth and Tomas engage in supernatural combat with a succession of possessed antagonists. Even the pope succumbs, because Amorth makes the mistake of forwarding a demonic 15th century letter to him, causing the holy father to projectile vomit blood in the face of an innocent bystander (as well as an archbishop). Amorth ultimately allows Asmodeus to inhabit him in order to save the family, whereupon an eerie underground vault serves as the stage for the final confrontation with Father Tomas, the ghosts of Amorth’s own and the church’s past, and the remainder of the film’s special effects budget. The final scene indicates that a further 199 demons remain buried in the earth at various sites across the planet, thereby setting up a potential Exorcist Brothers multiverse and line of action figures.
Joking aside, my abiding feeling after watching this film is utter bewilderment. The overall vibe is Da Vinci Code meets The Exorcist, but the underlying message is harder to fathom. Is this Catholic propaganda, directly commissioned by the Vatican to depict exorcists as Order of the Phoenix-style sorcerers? After all, the Church comes out looking pretty ripped; the crimes of the Inquisition are passed off as the machinations of a single possessed friar; while recent decades of equally uncomfortable revelations are tiptoed around and deftly swept under the carpet.
But what makes the film truly perplexing, and perhaps unduly elevates it above Vatican-endorsed horror b-movie Golden Raspberry fare, is the mysterious involvement of Russell Crowe. Many of his lines are double take-worthy (“prayers are stronger when they’re said in Latin”), but Crowe simply cannot help but bring biblical amounts of charisma to every role he’s in, even when he’s playing an out-of-shape exorcist in a Blackpool Pleasure Beach-style haunted house. I’m not ashamed to say that I am eagerly anticipating all seven sequels.
Rating: * * * / * *