The Pope's Exorcist

dir: Julius Avery

2023

You can completely not believe in something, and know that it’s highly refined bullshit, and still find it terrifying.

Having been brought up in the Christian faith, and educated at Catholic schools, there are no elements of these stories that are unfamiliar. And I long ago recoiled in horror from the actual, incalculable evils perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, and dismissed the mythological bullshit elements, seeing how the whole edifice was propped up with fear and control, covering hollow lies all the way down.

And yet… Sure, okay, I know this is all hysterical supernatural bullshit, fantasy stuff no more real than anything in the Lord of the Rings movies or Star Wars…

And yet… I can still find this stuff terrifying. The Exorcist still remains one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen, and that’s unlikely to ever, ever change. All I have to do is remember certain sequences and I get cold chills.

There was a scene in a recent, quite stupid movie called Ghosted where the two main characters have a conversation at a set of steps, and Chris Evans’ terrible character tells Ana De Armas “These are the steps from The Exorcist!”, and she’s like “okay grandpa””, but I was like “oh shit those are the cursed steps from The Exorcist?”

I don’t believe in ghosts and demons and such, but there is something about the idea of demonic possession that I find deeply, deeply disturbing. And again, though I don’t for a second believe in possession or exorcisms or any of that fucking bullshit, and also, not all flicks about demonic possession are created equally; when they work I am horrified beyond belief.

Most of the stuff I saw in terms of reviews about this flick dismissed it for a bunch of reasons – demonic possession stories are dumb, or the flicks not horrifying enough, or it’s not camp enough, or it’s too funny, or it’s not comical enough, or Russell Crowe is terrible with a risible accent, or Crowe is really good but slumming in a role that is beneath him.

Those are all takes. They’re wrong, but people are entitled to their takes.

Crowe takes the role seriously, and imbues it with a gravitas that it perhaps doesn’t deserve, but while he can be charming and flippant in many scenes, he takes the assignment on like it’s important stuff. He’s not winking at the audience.

But then that’s not always a good thing. He sometimes takes his roles (and himself) way too seriously. I think he struck the right balance here.

It helps maybe that he’s playing someone who actually, implausibly, existed. He died a few years ago, but the Father Gabriele Amorth Crowe plays here was an actual person, who actually existed, and who actually conducted exorcisms.

And while the Father Gabriele of the movie and the one in real life acknowledge the far more believable fact that the vast majority of these so-called demonic possessions were really just instances of psychosis, delusions or some other sadly relatable mental health incident, there’s that remaining 2 per cent where things were a bit iffy.

You cannot see, but I am doing the very Italian hand gesture for when something is iffy or so-so “cosi cosi”. You kind of spin your hand around in a gesture meant to express that something is not quite on the mark and pretty dodgy.

In the movie, Fr Gabriele says there is still evil, actual supernatural evil in the world. In the real world, Fr Gabriele claimed to have performed tens of thousands of “real” exorcisms, but also said people even doing yoga was Satanic, because doing yoga opened you up to Hinduism, and that, somehow, was a path straight to the Devil.

Which, you know, now makes a lot of sense. Once you’ve seen certain people do down face dog it’s hard to believe in a just and merciful God.

What I trying to say, as sensitively and gently as I can, is that the real Father Gabriele Amorth was clearly a nutjob who saw the devil in everything that went wrong in the world – stubbed your toe getting out of bed? The Devil! Card not working properly at the checkout? The Devil again! – but the film tones down his bonkers life narrative.

The movie is set in the 1980s, mostly because it’s meant to be set at a time where Crowe could believably be playing Amorth when he was in his 60s, but also so every time someone is listening to music on their Walkman, there’s some 80s bangers playing! Slayer! Violent Femmes! Even The Saints, for some reason.

And, also, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of recycling going on. Stranger Things became something of a cultural phenomenon by recycling images and tropes of the 80s for the 2020s, and The Pope’s Exorcist gets to recycle some of that imagery as well, instead of just relying on stuff from the original Exorcist.

So there are many scenes of people floating unnaturally in the air, having bones and tendons stretched in directions they’re not meant to go, and a bit of projectile vomiting of unholy liquids and such.

And then there’s the central terror of having your child seemingly possessed by the devil, and not being able to do a single thing about it.

Parenting can be terrifying even without the interference of the supernatural. Especially around bath time / feeding time / bed time. The child’s face and voice can change awfully, and you can barely recognise them as they scream harsh, often accurate, words at you.

And then you tell the doctors, or the cops, and everyone thinks you’re the one who’s crazy.

Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, who looks like a child version of Richard Ashcroft from The Verve) has the misfortune of losing his dad in a car accident in the previous year, and then is trapped with his mother and sister in a Spanish villa in Castile because of something to do with the real estate market. The mum’s plan is to renovate the place and then sell it, but honestly, even without demons from hell complicating the renovation works, that’s a terrible plan in that economy.

A demon possesses the boy, somehow emanating through the cracks of the building, infecting the boy, causing seizures, but when medicine can’t explain it, and the child bellows with a terrifying, much older voice “bring me the priest”, there can be Only One priest they could be talking about.

It’s Our Mate on the tiny Vespa, Australia’s Own (Kiwi) Rusty! Giggle as he rides a scooter three sizes too small for him! Chortle as he assays an accent that, hmm, does he really sound like an old Italian guy, or like an Aussie / Kiwi approximating some guy they once heard down at the fruit and veg market?

When the film starts Father Gabriele is constantly talking in Italian. People keep telling him to speak in English, and he’s like “nah, my Italian is the real deal”. Reluctantly, when everyone else keeps speaking in English, whether it’s in Italy, at the Vatican or in Spain, he’s like “okay, okay, I’ll speak your peasant language”, and then keeps saying stuff in Latin instead.

Always sounds better in Latin. Even as the good Father thinks this new case is probably bullshit again, he starts seeing things that can’t be faked (by the crazy person), and saying shit the kid couldn’t possibly know, so Gabriele knows this will take at least an hour and a half longer to resolve.

This isn’t just a run of the mill devil. This one is the real deal. Not the Big Guy himself, but one of the major bastards that fell with Lucifer to Earth after they were cast out of heaven for their hubris.

And yet, even as the flick points to the absurdity of demonic possession, in that some powerful supernatural creature has nothing better to do than possess some peasant out in the sticks, or some kid in a rundown hovel, no, this demon has a plan for world domination which, frankly, is too stupid for words so I’m not going to use any in describing it.

This flick neatly posits an idea that the reason the Catholic Church lost its way with the Inquisition onwards up to and including the millions of instances of child abuse and the cover ups / silencing of victims isn’t because the Catholic Church is inherently rotten and people, especially men, can justify any crime no matter how horrific: They happened because a demon did it. A demon infiltrated the highest echelons of the Holy Church and…

Well, the rest is history – very dumb history.

I laughed at all that foolishness, but the poor people in the grasp of this demon have such a harrowing time that all the other foolishness sort of melts away for me. You feel horrible for the poor kid, no-one wants anything bad to happen to a kid, but everyone else gets slammed around pretty horribly too. And the visions that assail them are quite horrific and quite specific.

Like any formidable opponent, whether it’s an overbearing mother or a work supervisor two levels above you, they know how to use your own weaknesses against you. This demon senses people fears, the guilt they carry for things they’ve done or didn’t do, and uses this to destroy them.

Father Gabriele deeply regrets surviving WWII when his partisan mates were slaughtered by the Fascists and he survived. Even forty years later the guilt still cripples him, no matter how many times he confesses. But that’s not even the “sin” that haunts him the most – a girl, Rosaria (Bianca Bardoe) who was mentally ill, killed herself because, he thinks, he failed her out of pride.

Gabriele has an offsider in the form of young Spanish hot priest Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), who is a sinner as well, because he failed in keeping his vows, and had sex with an actual human woman, consensually, it seems, but still under false pretenses. He really, really enjoyed having sex with her, but never had any intention of leaving the Church for her. And so she was sad.

As he confesses this, bro to bro to the older priest, young hot priest says something like “my sin was that I loved God more than I loved Adella (Carrie Munro)”. I really hoped Fr Amorth was going to slap him over the back of his head and say, “No, you stronzo, that’s not what you did wrong”, but the flick let me down, only this one time.

A lot of it I found compelling, even chilling. Not outright terrifying, but at the very least upsetting (in the ‘right’, non-traumatic way). The film eventually devolves into a strangely magical / fantastical CGI battle in the end, but I didn’t mind so much. The real essence of the flick is whether these two priests will be able to best an ancient enemy with only the power of their faith, the word of God and the desire to sacrifice themselves in order to save others, all things we all wish were actually true of the Catholic Church.

Sure it’s all nonsense, but it’s nonsense I enjoyed in the form of an entertaining movie.

7 times I have no doubt there will be a sequel out of 10

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“Exorcism is my job but the vast majority of the cases to which I am assigned do not require an exorcism. They just need a little conversation, a little understanding and sometimes a little theatre.” - The Pope’s Exorcist