Mark Reviews Movies: THE SEVENTH DAY (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 26, 2021

There's the kernel of a clever, kind of diabolical idea in The Seventh Day, but one has to wait for the climactic showdown between good and evil for it arrive. By then, writer/director Justin P. Lange just seems to be in a hurry to offer a couple more cheap scares and a rushed resolution.

This, of course, means that it's almost impossible to discuss what that somewhat-decent concept is without giving away the movie's biggest surprise. Then again, it's not much of a shocker, since Lange more or less telegraphs it to us several scenes earlier.

Why play such a game? It's a fine idea, hinting at something much darker and with some allegorical significance for a real-world concern. If Lange had simply gone for it from the start, he might have been on to something. His technique of waiting until the end, only to pretend as if the revelation is some kind of bombshell, just leaves us wondering about what could have been.

The central premise is almost a joke instead. A young priest, recently having completed training on exorcisms, is teamed up with a veteran of the cloth, who has been performing exorcisms for the last 25 years. The two priests—Fr. Daniel (a shaky Vadhir Derbez), the new guy, and Fr. Peter (a hammy Guy Pearce), the long-timer—drive around town looking for evil spirits to exorcise, as if they're more demon cops than priests.

It's kind of funny, watching them dressed in civilian clothes (They're basically undercover demon cops) and following leads about possible demonic activity and interrogating suspects with prayers. Lange doesn't mean it to be amusing. It just is.

Peter isn't just a vet of demonic happenings and banishments, either. He has "a score to settle." One nasty demon killed his priestly mentor (played by Keith David) all those years ago—an event we witness in a fairly routine prologue. The prologue gets an unnecessary recounting by the local archbishop (played by Stephen Lang), who has teamed Daniel with Peter, in an exposition dump that explains a lot to Daniel he already should know and the basics of Peter's history for anyone who comes into the movie late.

Daniel and Peter exorcise one demon, hiding in plain sight as a kindly old lady volunteering to help the homeless, and then, the real plot gets started. A young boy named Charlie (Brady Jenness) murdered his entire family recently, and Peter is convinced the boy did so under the influence of a demon. Daniel sneaks into the house where the murders occurred, has a vision of that horror (a poor excuse for some bloody violence and a jump-scare that means nothing), and is equally convinced.

If all of this was amusing until this point, the rest of it becomes downright ridiculous. It's as if Lange took the notion of demon police seriously and as if he assumes everyone in the world would buy into it, too.

These priests have more or less unfettered access to Charlie, currently locked up in prison (A call to the archbishop is all it takes, somehow, as if a local diocese has that kind of influence). They visit the boy in his cell, where Daniel meets the demon behind the kid's eyes face-to-face, and crash a psychological evaluation, where Charlie's demon shows off some levitation and slaughters some guards (seen through flashes of light in a dark room that don't line up with what's happening). There's also a bit with a spirit board (because, of course, there is), and somehow, the two priests take advantage of a suddenly empty prison to free Charlie and perform an exorcism where it all began.

We've unintentionally covered all of the plot (save for the twist), because it does become increasingly ludicrous and, besides, there simply isn't much here in the first place (The movie runs a bit over 80 minutes). The potential kicker of an idea arrives during the climactic exorcism. One doesn't have to analyze too much to see the connection to real scandal (Lange includes a scene hinting at it, which means the topic clearly was on his mind), but the filmmaker wraps up everything before that subversive notion—both in terms of genre and as a commentary on real-world events—can mean anything.

There's something beneath the surface of this genre-mashing story, which just becomes clichéd on multiple levels. The Seventh Day, though, mostly digs into its absurd setup and a series of predictable, futile scare attempts.

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