Let’s get the obvious out the way first; no, The Exorcism has no connection to The Pope’s Exorcist, the uniformly-titled occult horror released only last year where Russell Crowe played an exorcist and also shares a near identical poster. In fact, this uncanny case of cinematic deja-vu is one of the least peculiar artifacts related to the latest film in Crowe’s sudden commitment to becoming a newly reformed B-movie icon. Remember when this guy used to star in Michael Mann and Peter Weir films and, like, win Oscars?
Here Crowe plays Anthony Miller, an actor fresh out of rehab who’s looking to get his career back on track with a role in a possession occult horror movie called The Georgetown Project, where he plays the exorcist. However, the role of the exorcist is said to be cursed after the previous actor died of mysterious circumstances on set and Miller has to navigate not only the pressures of pleasing the tyrannical director, played to an insufferable degree of perfection by Adam Goldberg, but also his past demons that are awoken by this role.
Where it gets weird is that this film about a nightmare movie production itself reportedly went to hell and back to get finished. It was originally shot in 2019 but was subject to heavy negative feedback by Miramax, which planned for intensive reshoots. However covid threw a spanner in that, resulting in the film being repeatedly overhauled before reshoots were completed last year, a near-unprecedented gap of four years in-between. First-time director (jeez, what a first impression) Joshua John Miller has said that for most of that period he didn’t think the film would ever get released, but after being shuffled off to a different distributor it’s now been released last minute to catch the wave of recent Christploitation movies like The First Omen, Immaculate, The Exorcist: Believer, and yes, The Pope’s Exorcist.
The whiplash between the winking playfulness of the opening and the progressively severe, heavy latter half is painfully noticeable, particularly as the few gags sprinkled in (or perhaps what remains of them) land consistently well
What we’re left with after such a monumentally broken production is a predictably confused final product, one that almost begs to be investigated for what this was possibly supposed to be and why the higher-ups so aggressively tried to revise this film. A producer credit from Kevin Williamson is a possible hint towards what this film was originally supposed to be, Williamson being the writer behind the Holy Grail of meta-horror Scream. The opening scene shows a priest driving up to a large ominous house in the middle of the night and knocking on the door, before he narrates himself entering and talking to an empty room, revealing that he’s an actor rehearsing his lines alone on a huge soundstage, played with great Stanley Tucci-esque wit by Adrian Pasdar. His mysterious death in the first scene as the screenplay he’s reading seems to come alive with every word sets up a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek approach to the meta-horror movie trope where Crowe must now step into this cursed role whilst also facing the pressures of carrying this entire production.
The opening act fully leans into this self-aware approach, Peter the egotistical director preaches that his film “Isn’t a horror movie, but a psychological drama wrapped in a horror movie”, seemingly poking fun at the ‘elevated horror’ trope. In another scene the actress playing the obligatory possessed girl, a charming Chloe Bailey, lists how this film is just another horror movie that has an infamously jinxed production and lists off The Omen and The Exorcist as examples. In fact The Georgetown Project seems to be an unofficial remake/rip-off of The Exorcist, something that for some reason is never mentioned or played for laughs even though the characters clearly acknowledge the film. Perhaps the fear of a letter from the copyright Gods was what gave the producers cold feet. And just to add to the weird meta-ness, director Joshua John Miller is the son of Jason Miller, who played the key role of Father Damien in The Exorcist.
It’s when we get to the horror in the later acts that this film starts to struggle with its identity, a series of lazily conceptualised scares that consist of Crowe creeping out his daughter, Ryan Simpkins, by standing in a corner a lot and doing the scary devil voice. These scenes become particularly grating by how reliant the film is on using sheer volume to make these scenes scary by not only playing a ridiculously loud jab of music to punctuate what is an ostensibly unscary moment but by how comically cranked-up certain sounds of Crowe’s footsteps and his hand slapping against a bannister are. The whiplash between the winking playfulness of the opening and the progressively severe, heavy latter half is painfully noticeable, particularly as the few gags sprinkled in (or perhaps what remains of them) land consistently well compared to the blatant unoriginality of its horror.
A mad sprint to the finish to wrap everything up just past the 90-minute mark reeks of a generic loss of ideas and seems to give up on its promising premise by bailing its attempt to subvert or play with The Exorcist and instead just resorts to ripping it off without a shred of self-awareness. What could have been a humorous psychological shocker about the lengths a method actor will go to learn his lines is instead stripped away to its dullest components and makes you wonder why the movie-within-a-movie approach was even used in the first place. Anyone left confused by what franchise this film does or doesn’t take place in beforehand will be left with an entirely different set of questions about this film’s identity.
The Exorcism is out now in Cinemas Nationwide via Vertigo Releasing
