The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

Score: 4 / 5

Russell Crowe is a strange bird. Often lauded for his tough-guy persona and featured in films that require that role, he has typically been a solid if one-note performer; offscreen, his personal life is laced with real-life violence that for some reason hasn't been as controversial or denounced as other, less "macho" men. I've rarely found him to be compelling, but I do often enjoy films that star or feature him (for example, his woefully miscast turn in Les Miserables or his surprisingly insightful portrayal of the biblical Noah). So when we heard he would be leading a new exorcism movie, I was intrigued. The genre, trailblazed of course by William Friedkin and his brilliant casting of Max von Sydow, regularly features an older, respected character actor in the role of senior exorcist. Think Anthony Hopkins in The Rite or Tom Wilkinson in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Russell Crowe has apparently now reached that status.

Armed as he is with an Italian accent and full priestly regalia, Crowe here plays a highly fictionalized interpretation of Father Gabriele Amorth, famously the Vatican's longest-serving modern exorcist, whose many autobiographical books serve as source material for this film. The real-life man was the subject of a documentary by Friedkin himself in 2017, and his cases number so high that this film seems eager to capitalize on the potential for a franchise (not unlike how The Conjuring franchise leaps off the Warrens' case files). But Crowe's performance as Amorth is what will draw audiences, and he knows it, so he plays it up to the max; he's thoughtful, hilarious, and daring in this role, taking the film both far more seriously than I expected and clearly having a lot of fun the whole time. He's truly electrifying to behold.

Amorth, as dramatized here, is a bit of a Western action hero dressed as a world-weary priest, complete with a whiskey flask he uses to wet his whistle regularly. There's really nothing he hasn't seen, but this time, he's in a bit over his head. He's called to an abbey in rural Spain, where an American family has taken ownership of the property and is working to renovate and sell it. Mother Julia (Alex Essoe), daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden), and son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) are still reeling from the death of the husband/father: the mother's intense task-orientation, the daughter's burgeoning sexuality, and the son's muteness make them prime candidates for possession. It doesn't take long for Henry to go full Pazuzu-style dangerous, with lots of profanity and blasphemy, lesions and vomiting, levitation and contortion.

The opening sequence, it should be noted, is crucial to our understanding of this film, as it directly informs the aesthetic director Julius Avery (who also directed the wonderful Overlord in 2018) employs. In it, Amorth exorcises a demon from a young Italian boy and then slaughters the pig into which the demon was sent. When chastised by a tribunal, he declares it was no real exorcism, but rather a bit of theatre to psychologically help an ill or disordered patient. This recalls the sociological discussions of the rite in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but rather than wading into further medical or legal waters here, Avery simply takes the notion of theatrics and makes that our viewing experience of this film. Like Friedkin did to some extent with poor Regan and her head-spinning pea soup, Avery is going to take us on a ride through hell to experience Grand Guignol possession horror. It's a shocking and brilliant choice, but it won't be for everyone.

Once Amorth gets to the abbey, the main story really gets going, and again, this is where The Pope's Exorcist aggressively toys with our expectations. Some people may dislike this movie because it isn't all that "scary." The possession-related material we've seen before, if not always as brightly colored and frenetically stylized as this. And rather than building characters (other than Amorth himself), the film is more concerned with jumping around to tell lots of plot strands: we keep jumping back to Rome to see the Pope (Franco Nero) reading about the abbey and learning the truth of what evil is hidden there. The "busy-ness" of the screenplay will doubtless be derided as impatient and unfocused, but I found it just disorienting enough to better serve the story. In fact, I'd consider this more of a horror-action flick, in which a Bible-slinging Western-wannabe John Wayne-type priest arrives in a town of demons and has to take them on headfirst with no backup but a helpless mother and daughter and an eager but innocent young partner (Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto of It Follows and Don't Breathe and Fear the Walking Dead, and ABC's Revenge, which I note with personal delight).

I enjoyed this movie probably far more than I should have, but this is my blog, so that's okay. Other than a surprisingly effective Crowe, it features beautiful cinematography (though the editing is unfortunate) and a fine mix of score and sound editing. I quite liked Essoe, despite her being hamstrung by the screenplay, though the children are both obnoxious, as is so often the case in this genre. The voice of the demon is the usually wonderful Ralph Ineson, though I labored through most of the movie thinking it was a bored Ray Winstone. Finally, I'll note that the main theme of the film, as I see it, is that your sins will invariably follow you. Most exorcism movies turn this into a character study of the priests and victims; this one refocuses the theme on the Church itself, which is a delicious touch. As such, it kind of embraces a Dan Brown-esque critique of the Inquisition specifically, basically saying the Devil has orchestrated the Church's evils for centuries, which is historically and ethically reprehensible, but makes for fun entertainment if you don't put much stock in it.