Mark Reviews Movies: THE UNHOLY (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 1, 2021

Writer/director Evan Spiliotopoulos approaches the edge of discovering something intriguing, subversive, or downright terrifying in The Unholy, but his directorial debut is simply content to play it safe and familiar. There are some potentially fascinating ideas in this story, having to do with faith and doubt and religion as a commodity. In the movie's presentation of the supernatural villain in this tale, though, Spiliotopoulos shows he's less interested in ideas and more concerned with the tangible, the easy-to-digest, and anything that can elicit a cheap jump-scare.

We meet the antagonist first, in a rather chilling prologue—seen from a series of subjective shots—of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1845. The woman is tortured, has a mask nailed to her face (The sound design in this scene—of the hammer striking metal, followed by a wet crunch—is particularly gruesome), and is hanged from a tree. A local priest makes his pronouncements of the woman's sins against her screams of agony, holding up a doll to contain the evil she possesses.

In the present day, disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) now writes for an online tabloid. He takes an assignment about cow mutilations in a small Massachusetts town, which turns out to be nothing at all. While exploring a field, he finds a tree, familiar to us after the prologue, and a doll in a nook at its base. Thinking he can make some kind of story out of this, Gerry smashes the doll. This, obviously, will not go well.

While driving out of town, a drunk Gerry almost hits a young woman standing in the middle of the road. After crashing his car, the journalist follows the woman to the tree, sees her kneel at its base, and hears her praying. This, as it turns out, should be impossible.

The young woman is Alice (Cricket Brown), and according to her uncle Fr. Hagan (William Sadler) and local doctor Natalie (Katie Aselton), Alice has been deaf since she was born and is unable to speak. Soon after, Alice speaks again in front of the whole town, proclaiming that she has been healed by the Virgin Mary, who came to her in a vision.

Spiliotopoulos' screenplay, which is adapted from James Herbert's 1983 novel Shrine, contains some undeniable promise at the start. Thanks to Gerry's reporting, Alice's miraculous healing becomes the talk of the town, the region, and beyond. People start to flock there, hoping for Mary or Alice to cure them or their loved ones, and from a few other miracle healings, it appears that Alice does or can channel some kind of divine power.

The archbishop in Boston (played by Cary Elwes) starts an investigation, calling upon Monsignor Delgarde (Diogo Morgado), a renowned inquisitor of miracles, to look into the case. If it's authentic, the Vatican may deem the town an official shrine.

There are few things undermining the theological debates and conceits that come into focus as all of this unfolds. First, of course, there's the prologue, which gives away the game of what's really happening here at the start. Second, there's the constant appearance of a creepy cloaked figure, rushing toward the camera in a nightmare or popping into frame to offer a screeching face hidden behind a mask.

On one level, knowing what's happening here doesn't undermine the tale, which does become about the hypocrisy of treating faith as something that can bring fame and sell merchandise. There's a subversive irony in our knowledge that the "Mary" of Alice's visions and the miracles is a false icon.

There is, in other words, a thoughtful and genuinely sinister tale simmering beneath the surface of this material, and to its credit, the movie does present and wrestle with some of those concepts and their implications. Alice becomes a worldwide sensation and something akin to a marketing tool for the proposed shrine (T-shirts proclaim, "Alice saves"). When presented with some pretty clear evidence toward the fact that evil is at play, the archbishop is too caught up in the hype and what it means for his reputation to even consider the possibility. There's money, prestige, and a regular parade of tourists to the shrine to consider—and, indeed, hold above the truth.

There's another level to knowing what's happening here, and it's the one upon which Spiliotopoulos eventually settles. We have a pretty clear-cut supernatural villain in the form of "Mary," and the filmmaker treats the ghostly/demonic character, not as the underlying idea of false faith, but as a physical threat.

For every thoughtful scene about the theological underpinnings of this story, there's at least one other scene that has "Mary" scaring or otherwise tormenting these characters. She hides, speaks in a raspy voice, and appears in the shadows, only to jump in front of the camera, appear out of nowhere, or inflict some violence. The climax, of course, becomes a demonic revel of attacks and fire.

This character is much better as an idea, but such isn't the ultimate goal of this movie. The Unholy teases us with a clever and eerie tale about the twisting of faith, but it gradually and finally becomes little more than a generic horror show.

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