THE EXORCISM - Mark Reviews Movies

The Exorcism, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 20, 2024

The Exorcism is a movie about the making of a familiar exorcism movie that becomes an entirely familiar exorcism story. That's to say this movie has a few layers, at least, but all of them are as routine and clichéd as they get.

The premise of director Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin's screenplay definitely holds some self-aware potential, harkening back to trivia and urban legends about famous movies about demons and the devil somehow being cursed. In the opening scene here, an actor, scheduled to play a priest simultaneously dealing with a crisis of faith and the possession of a teenage girl by a demonic force, goes over his script pages on the production's empty set, a replica of a multistory house. As he reaches the climax of the scene on the set's uppermost floor, the lights begin to flicker, as some eerie noises fill the air, and finally, some invisible thing tightens its grip around the actor's neck.

The show must go on, of course, so disgraced former star Anthony Miller (Russell Crowe) is called upon to take over the role from the dead actor. He has had some very public personal issues as of late: his wife's death to cancer, his spiral into addictions of alcohol and drugs, and his near-estrangement from his teenage daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins). After going through rehab and with the daughter returning home after being suspended from boarding school, Anthony has this one chance to prove that he's clean, sober, and still capable of giving the kind of performance that made him a movie star years ago.

Miller and Fortin make their ambitions plain quite quickly, as the movie's director Peter (Adam Goldberg) explains his vision of a "psychological drama wrapped in the skin of a horror movie," co-star Blake (Chloe Bailey) points out infamous examples of supposedly cursed productions, and Lee mocks the notion that her father's newest project, codenamed "The Georgetown Project," is a remake of some well-known classic. The filmmakers repeatedly nudge their material, by extension making a promise that, while it all might seem to be recognizable stuff, there's something different about their self-referential conceit.

Instead, the movie simply indulges in the usual scenarios and impulses of any given movie about demonic possession. The result would be annoying if it weren't so inherently lazy.

Some of the usual stuff includes Anthony's own crisis of faith. He was religious as a kid, a regular altar boy at his childhood Catholic church, until a young Anthony was abused by the parish priest. That makes his interactions with Father Conor (David Hyde Pierce), hired as a consultant on the movie, awkward in a way that seems to be suggesting something about the man of the cloth. It's not, of course, because any movie about demonic possession needs a pragmatic minister, preferably a Catholic one, to suss out the psychological from the supernatural and ultimately recite some archaic rites at just the right moment.

It can't be giving away too much to point out that this movie climaxes with someone possessed by a demon yelling profane things at someone else shouting prayers. For all of the effort made to introduce a meta level of storytelling here and to transform Anthony into a most tortured actor playing a most tormented priest, though, it's inherently disappointing that the story's potential is ultimately reduced to an ending that's so formulaic.

The rest of the movie doesn't fare much better. There are other accidents—or "accidents"—on set, such as when the director is almost crushed by a falling stage light after chewing out his star or when another actor receives an unexpected surprise from the other end of a vanity mirror. Anthony's behavior starts to become erratic. Is it his guilt about abandoning his dying wife, a relapse into addiction, the trauma of his past abuse, or whatever evil spirit might be haunting the set for reasons that have been left unexplained—probably for the best—by the screenplay? If we're going with Peter's metaphor from before, the skin here is a self-serious psychological drama, wrapped around a horror movie that thinks jump-scares, creepy voices, flashing lights, unexpected Latin, and other such clichés are the height of suspense and terror.

Miller's tone is dark, although not nearly as obscured-in-shadow as some of the scenes here, and dreadfully severe to the point that, despite the self-effacing backdrop of making a movie like this one, not a bit of humor or insight about the behind-the-scenes process emerges. The Exorcism is just content to make yet another movie about demonic possession, and it doesn't even do that well.

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