The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t provide much in the way of horror novelty or even quality, yet it has a charm that makes it a comfortable addition to the list of bad movies we’ll probably go see the sequels to anyway.
Directed by Julius Avery, the film follows a well-trodden narrative path for demonic possession movies: a grieving family moves into a new house, evil escapes from a mysterious hole in the ground, things start going bump in the night, a young child becomes possessed, and his soul’s only hope is an exorcism. Specifically, in this case, an exorcism performed by the Pope’s exorcist himself, Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe). In the background, the Catholic Church questions the optics of publicly acknowledging exorcism in the modern era, putting Amorth’s position at risk.
It seems that the entire budget was spent on Russell Crowe. The rest of the cast didn’t succeed in any compelling acting. The colored contacts should have been wrestled away from the makeup team and the SFX team reprimanded for the cheesy CGI. The score came in at odd times, even. Yet the right choice here really was to spend whatever it was they spent on Crowe. To my untrained ear, his Italian is molto bene. The witty quips written for him are some of the only good dialogue in the film. The scenes of him in his clerical vestments riding a Lambretta scooter impart a memorable whimsy.
The actor playing the possessed boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) doesn’t quite have the chops for this role, but it might also be the case that The Exorcist only works with a young girl being possessed. Sure, it’s unfortunate that it works because it plays into stereotypes of how boys and girls behave, or are socialized to behave, but a sweet, blonde preteen girl spouting obscenities is shocking and unnerving, whereas a scrawny, unwell-looking boy cursing at his mom for not breastfeeding him is, well, just gross.
It’s not possible to call this movie “good.” The writing is a tad too cliched, the special effects are giving low-budget sci-fi, and the acting, on the whole, is unimpressive—but it’s still fun. It’s pulpy and it’s silly, it’s at times cringey, and it doesn’t care that it is. It’s representative of a shift away from the dense, meaning-filled horror that has been popular the last few years (this one does get political in a Dan Brown kind of way and suggests that all of the Catholic Church’s wrongdoings, ever, have been the work of the Devil—convenient!). Russell Crowe is a delight, and without him the film wouldn’t be worth the watch. But he is in it, and I’ll happily buy a ticket to every one of the 199 sequels this movie has teed up, as long as he’s in them too.
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