IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 6th April
Seen: 24th July
It’s almost a cliche at this point to bring up The Exorcist when talking about a movie featuring exorcism but it’s kind of impossible, some movies are just such a massive part of the cinematic landscape that anyone else touching that subgenre is inevitably going to be compared to them. Horror in particular has this problem a lot, all slasher movies tend to be leaning into templates made by Halloween or Friday the 13th, all Zombie movies are just riffing on Dawn of the Dead and all exorcism movies are basically just The Exorcist with a fresh coat of paint. You can absolutely do new interesting things with the genre, films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose throwing the genre into the courtroom create an interesting take on the genre… or you can just go “Oh but here’s a real person who actually did this job” and then do another version of The Exorcist but without the brilliance that made the 1977 film an absolute legend.
The Pope’s Exorcist tells one of many allegedly true stories from Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe). In this one, Father Gabriele is teamed up with the much younger Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) to attend to the case of a young American boy named Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) who has been dragged to Spain by his mother Julia (Alex Essoe). Henry appears to be possessed by a demon who is making him go through all the classic things that demons do, which we know is to make kids shout sex words and vomit up things that aren’t vomit. The two fathers go through with an exorcism, discover that the house they’re in has something to do with the Spanish Inquisition (which no one expects), and do battle with the demon in the traditional exorcist manner by yelling bible verses at a child with a shockingly deep and scratchy voice… oh and occasionally there are jokes, that’s what makes this one different.
To give The Pope’s Exorcist a tiny bit of credit, it does have a few interesting ideas going for it, ideas it might not explore as much as it should but at least it has them. The key one that keeps coming up is the idea that not all things that look like possessions are actually possessions, sometimes it is just mental illness and a specialised kind of help is needed. At the very start of the film Father Gabriele points out that most of the time he’s asked to go somewhere he’s just dealing with someone mentally ill and has to get them help because he isn’t right for the job. This is objectively a great thing for the film to bring up. It’s good that the film acknowledges that exorcism isn’t just a catch-all cure and actually talks about mental health on some level… such a pity that it then basically goes “Oh but this one, this possession is totally real and doesn’t need mental health help at all, also one of the priests got mental help for someone in a bad way in the past so maybe think twice about it”.
To the shock of no one, The Pope’s Exorcist runs into the exact problem that every other exorcism movie runs into… namely, we’ve seen The Exorcist and you are not going to be anywhere near as good as that movie so why bother? It doesn’t help that The Pope’s Exorcist is basically just a slightly faster version of The Exorcist, all that’s changed is occasionally people speak in Spanish and there’s a small scene that takes place underground in the moment where the Spanish Inquisition unexpectedly comes in to be a part of the story. Beyond that, it’s just The Exorcist with the old priest and young priest having repeated sessions with a possessed child who occasionally screams that they’re going to fuck the priest… that’s it, that’s all we get for the entire film and sure it’s not fair to compare this film to one of the greatest of all time but the fact remains that it’s just doing what that film did only it’s doing it worse.
Like most films of this type, there are two major elements to The Pope’s Exorcist that’s meant to disturb the audience. The first is the shock value of a small child yelling obscenities which isn’t as shocking now as it was back in the 70s, and also not helped by the fact that Henry is a nothing character. You don’t know Henry before the exorcism (which is the thing that made The Exorcist such a fantastic film) so why the hell should you care? It’s not a kid we know or have any chance to like, it’s not even a slow change from “Henry” to “Demon”, he just turns into a demon after having basically no lines of dialogue and we’re meant to somehow care about him just because he’s a kid… no? Sorry no, that’s not how that works. Again, it’s taking from The Exorcist and thinking that we cared about Regan because she was so young but no, we cared because we had time to get to know her as a character and saw her slowly turn into something horrifying, that’s why it worked. The Pope’s Exorcist just assumes we’re going to go along with its bullshit but doesn’t offer a reason for us to join it.
The second element of The Pope’s Exorcist that’s meant to disturb you is just the loud noises, that’s all it’s really got in terms of scares. Sure there are a few disturbing ideas sprinkled through but this film lives and dies by the idea that there needs to be a loud sound of some kind every 5 minutes, which just gets annoying. Either someone’s yelling, a door is slamming or someone’s accidentally making something explode and this happens so often that eventually you just tune it out because it’s annoying. There’s no tension being built between these loud sounds, it wants to make you jump without making you hold your breath beforehand which is what would make the jump an effective moment of horror. It’s just kind of dull until the decibels go up and you have a moment of surprise before going back to being dull again. Repeat this for 90 minutes until the film tells you that Father Gabriele wrote some good books and then you can go.
The Pope’s Exorcist had some half-decent ideas and even a good performance by its over-talented lead (I do love that Oscar Winner Russell Crowe is just doing weird B movies now, though this performance is nowhere near as compelling as his performance in Unhinged) but it’s not offering anything new and doesn’t manage to hit the bare minimum standards that you would expect from this genre. It’s not really that scary, not really that interesting, and not even bad enough to annoy anyone. It’s just kind of dull, if you’ve somehow never seen The Exorcist before then maybe it’ll work on you because you don’t have a better point of reference to work with. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the time.
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