Mark Reviews Movies: MY BEST FRIEND'S EXORCISM

My Best Friend's Exorcism, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 30, 2022

The title gives away the climax, but more to the point, the whole framing of My Best Friend's Exorcism as a horror story about a teenage girl's demonic possession belittles everything else this movie attempts to address. Is that the point? If it is, no one involved in the movie seems to have received that memo.

One could look at this as a parody of those after-school specials that appeared on television, especially during the period of this story's setting. It's the 1980s, and there's a war on drugs and a panic about all things potentially Satanic. Jenna Lamia's screenplay, based on the novel by Grady Hendrix, brings up those things and treats them with nudging derision (Well, that is until the whole demon problem turns out to be accurate in the movie's world).

It also, though, raises far less propagandistic and far more harmful issues, such as prejudice, religious hypocrisy, eating disorders, sexual assault, and how women and girls are shamed for things done to them, as well as for who they are and any kind of relatively innocent fun they might want to have. Are we supposed to laugh at or dismiss that material, too? If so, that feels intrinsically wrong, and if not, why are such severe topics so closely related to the movie's gimmick and gags?

This, of course, assumes the movie is a comedic lark, and from the way director Damon Thomas approaches and treats this tale and its assorted thematic components, it's difficult to assert that such is even the case. The movie is a tonal mess, mainly because Thomas doesn't seem to know what kind of movie he's meant to be making.

The screenplay isn't much of a help. At first, it's a pretty straightforward story about the friendship between Abby (Elsie Fisher), who comes from a working-class home, and Gretchen (Amiah Miller), whose parents are well-to-do and fervently Christian. The two are classmates at a Catholic high school, run by tough nuns and a friar on whom Abby has a bit of a crush. The most pressing conflict for the two is that Gretchen will be moving soon, but after sneaking off to the vacation home of a mutual friend, things become much worse.

Their other friends are Glee (Cathy Ang), who's hiding that she's a lesbian, and Margaret (Rachel Ogechi Kanu), who's dating "horn-dog" Wallace (Clayton Royal Johnson) and has some self-esteem issues regarding her weight. Wallace, who gives the girls a scare when they're communicating with something via a spirit board, has some LSD tabs. When Abby and Gretchen decide to check out an abandoned building where a ritual sacrifice is rumored to have taken place, the two are separated, and Gretchen is chased and nabbed by some unseen presence.

The rest of the story has Gretchen becoming ill in ways that we, as an audience well aware of the clichés of possession stories and expecting that from the title, instantly recognize as some demonic force within the teen—paleness, anxiety, violent projectile vomiting. Abby, good and compassionate friend that she is (Fisher is solid and subdued here, regardless of the material's failings), makes a different connection, though. When Gretchen tells her friend how someone or something attacked her in that worn-down building, Abby assumes, based on symptoms that align with post-traumatic stress, her best friend was raped and tries to get her help.

The filmmakers' thinking here, as well as when it comes to some other very real issues that arise, is confounding. They clearly want us to take Abby's concerns seriously, considering how both Gretchen's parents, who are more mortified that their daughter took drugs, and the school administration, which scolds Abby for suggesting the ruination of Gretchen's "maidenhood," respond to them. Obviously, none of it—the possibility that Gretchen was assaulted, the prejudice Glee faces because of her sexuality, Margaret's physical troubles when she starts drinking a mysterious "diet shake" and stops eating—matters in any kind of real-world context to the filmmakers, though. As we've been prompted to expect from the title and the how things unfold, all of this is just the work of some demonic force, and that inherently undermines any kind of sincere handling of these topics.

Again, the movie might not even be taking them seriously. How can we tell? After all, My Best Friend's Exorcism leads to a third act that's an alternately comedic and genuine take on the title event (The exorcist is a faith-based, high-five-happy bodybuilder, played by Christopher Lowell), as well as one that wants us to see beneath the humor and clichés to the relationship at its heart. This is the simple, unfortunate case of a movie that doesn't know how it wants to tell its story.

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