Mark Reviews Movies: PREY FOR THE DEVIL

Prey for the Devil, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 28, 2022

There's a better story somewhere in Prey for the Devil, but isn't that so often the case with movies about demonic possession? This one, written by Robert Zappia and directed by Daniel Stamm, at least acknowledges some elements that might have made for a more engaging and thoughtful tale about this material. The movie presents ideas such as trauma and, that most Catholic of concepts, guilt, as well as the usefulness of exorcisms in a modern age that has a better understanding of and empathy for how illnesses of the mind can almost certainly account for what would have seemed legitimate cases of possession in the past.

Little of that really matters by the end of this movie, though, because it ultimately is just about demons and a battle between good and evil, in which the good guys shout prayers at some poor soul whose body is being abused by an unseen evil presence. We've seen most of this before. While Stamm certainly gives those very loud scenes of demonic influence an admirable level of creepiness, the movie teases us with enough that goes beyond the clichés that the end result feels even more generic and disappointing.

Our protagonist is Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers), a nun at a school for exorcism in Boston (Some opening text explains how such teaching used to be the exclusive purview of the Vatican, but with the rise of supposed demonic possessions, the Church has had to expand). Ann wants to learn about exorcisms, but as a woman, the Church restricts her from any kind of official instruction. That doesn't stop her from attending classes held by Father Quinn (Colin Salmon), who admires her gumption.

She's also a nurse for patients/victims, confined to hospital rooms as they await some kind of medical or spiritual intervention, although it's probably best not to think about the logistics of the institution for too long. After all, the whole point is that some of these possessed people will give Ann and others a fright every now and then. There's even a bit of unintentional humor in how one room is decorated to look exactly like the kind of kid's bedroom setting where we usually expect an exorcism scene to take place.

Ann is a wounded soul, haunted by a childhood filled with abuse at the hands of her mother. While the resident psychiatrist Dr. Peters (Virginia Madsen) insists a likely diagnosis of schizophrenia, Ann is convinced that her otherwise loving mother was under the control of a demon during her violent moments. The initial setup here, in which a woman of faith tries to explain or even justify her victimization and a woman of science attempts to break through that denial with the hard truth, puts forth an intriguing debate.

The rest of the movie, unfortunately, only seems occasionally interested in that notion or the inner conflict of these characters. Ann becomes personally connected to one of the institution's wards, a 10-year-old girl named Natalie (Posy Taylor). Natalie may or may not be possessed by a demon, but whom does this movie think it's kidding? She is, obviously, and of course, said demon is the same one that tormented Ann's mother.

The filmmakers at least get the prayer-shouting out of the way early, as Ann is allowed to witness Frs. Dante (Christian Navarro), who also has a family member suffering from demonic possession (The Vatican might as well start opening exorcism academies on every corner with these odds), and Raymond (Nicholas Ralph) try to get the demon out of Natalie. Cuts open on the girl's hands. She scrambles straight up a wall. She seems capable of appearing and disappearing to fool the priests, and when she is visible, her body can contort in bone-cracking ways.

All of this is to be expected, and Stamm and Zappia oblige, while pushing the arguments and possibilities that anything else might be going on here into the backdrop—and, then, completely out of the picture. Ann gets to participate in an unsanctioned exorcism later, performed on a woman who feels guilty for terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape, and the woman's inflating abdomen and some impressions made from within her body are quite eerie.

Underneath the surface of the scene, though, is the faith-based guilt—of a mindset that the psychiatrist reminds her class led to the Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials—that resulted in this psychological or spiritual pain. There are enough hasty edits of narrative and thematic whiplash (For example, Natalie is fine at the end of one scene, only for the next one to reveal she is definitely not) to lead one to believe that some of the filmmakers' ideas were left or forced out of the final cut.

Either way, the third act rushes to establish a connection between Ann and Natalie, Ann's unofficial rise to exorcist, and yet another very busy sequence of demonic chaos. Prey for the Devil follows the established, predictable lines of material like this, but one suspects the filmmakers know there's a better story between those lines. Why they settled for the usual is a mystery and a disappointment.

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