Russell Crowe battles demons in The Pope’s Exorcist

The Pope’s Exorcist is a more fictional account that takes The Exorcist and adds a bit of the Da Vinci Code and a splash of Indiana Jones.

Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe) in The Pope’s Exorcist

The Pope’s Exorcist (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★½

Is The Pope’s Exorcist Russell Crowe’s first horror movie? I think so. More on that in a moment. First to the film itself, which is directed by an Australian and co-written by an Australian.

It is a powerful historical drama and Crowe is outstanding as a real life Vatican exorcist-in-chief. It is his best film since the 2020 road rage thriller Unhinged.

As to Crowe and horror, yes, he is Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde in The Mummy (2017), starring Tom Cruise, which flopped horrifically at the box office. He is also the title character in Noah (2014), which has a biblically high body count.

In terms of supernatural horror, though, this is his debut and part of the reason goes back to when he was a 14-year-old sitting in an Auckland cinema.

He saw the 1973 movie The Exorcist, based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, and thought once was enough. “It scared the living daylights out of me,” he said in a recent interview with the ABC.

He added that he hoped his new film, while focused on the “serious gig” of undoing demonic possession, contained some humour.

It is based on the memoirs of one of the Vatican’s most famous exorcists, Gabriel Amorth (1925-2016), who Crowe thinks was “goofy and cheeky”.

Crowe, speaking a fair bit of Italian (there are subtitles), captures the personality of this offbeat priest without overdoing it. Father Amorth rides a Vespa, wears sunglasses, has a flask of whisky secreted in his soutane and tells jokes.

The film starts with a house call in the Italian town of Tropea. It is 1987. A young man declares he is satan. Amorth does not believe him. He asks for a pig to be brought into the room. As he later explains, a “bit of theatre” can be useful.

This impressive opening explains Amorth’s approach. He knows that 98 per cent of cases are not demonic possession but physical and/or mental illness. Asked to characterise the remaining 2 per cent, he pauses and replies, “I call it evil.”

It is one such case, soon afterwards, in Castile, Spain, that is the centre of the film, which is directed by Julius Avery, whose previous movie was the alternate superhero adventure Samaritan, starring Sylvester Stallone.

The script is by Michael Petroni, whose credits include the 2013 adaptation of Markus Zusak’s bestseller The Book Thief, and Greek-American writer Evan Spiliotopoulos.

A 40-something American widow (Alex Essoe), her Spanish husband dead 12 months, moves into a dilapidated abbey that has been in his family for generations.

She plans to fix it, sell it, leave Spain and return home, much to the relief of her rebellious teen daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden).

Her pre-teen son Henry (an impressive Peter DeSouza-Feighony) has not spoken since his dad died in a car accident.

The devil, however, has other ideas. Henry suddenly speaks. His first word is “Mummy”.

His next five words, deep and guttural (voiced by Yorkshire actor Ralph Ineson), are “You’re all going to die.”

The Pope (Franco Nero) hears of the case and sends Amorth to investigate. He soon reckons an exorcism is needed and asks the local priest, Father Tomas Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), to assist him.

From here we move into genuine horror. If you remember Linda Blair’s rotating, regurgitating head in The Exorcist you will know what to expect.

However, a strength of this 103-minute movie is the underlying human horror stories. Both priests have sins on their souls. When Amorth confesses his, the Oscar winner Crowe is at his best.

And the Catholic Church itself is hiding something. This secret, once revealed, is one of the funnier aspects the film, perhaps unintentionally. All I’ll say is that it involves the Spanish Inquisition.

Amorth has been the subject of a documentary, The Devil and Father Amorth (2017), directed by the director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin.

The Pope’s Exorcist is a more fictional account that takes The Exorcist and adds a bit of the Da Vinci Code and a splash of Indiana Jones. This combination does become a bit loopy towards the end, but overall this is an entertaining film.

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Hunger (MA15+)
Netflix
★★★★½
Food made with love versus food made with hate. That’s the culinary challenge at the core of the Thai drama Hunger, which has an early slot on my films of the year list.

In one corner of the kitchen is the famous and feared Chef Paul (Nopachai Jayanama). In the other is a young chef he hires. He finds Aoy (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) slaving away at a cheap noodle house run by her family.

Both lead actors are outstanding. Chef Paul, the “high priest of fine dining”, is a private caterer to Thailand’s rich and powerful, from government ministers to the generals who appointed them to corporate magnates, crypto currency traders, socialites and influencers.

He is an unsmiling, angry god, or perhaps devil. He disdains the food he prepares and has contempt for the people who eat it. He creates dishes that are messy, bloody, designed to “awaken your primal instincts”.

At black-tie gatherings male and female “bigshots” have food oozing from their mouths and lift their plates to lick them clean.

A scene from Hunger

His business is called Hunger. Yet it is not hunger for food that he creates. He generates hunger for more of everything. More money, more power, more likes, more love, more fame, more cocaine and, most of all, more Chef Paul. “The more you eat,’’ runs his corporate motto, “the hungrier you get.”

The food is tasted, rhapsodised over for a second and then becomes irrelevant, has cigarettes stubbed out in it. Chef Paul looks on, his mephistophelean face showing nothing.

His prime motivation is revenge. A flashback to his impoverished childhood reveals why. It involves himself, his mother, who is a maid in a mansion, and a jar of caviar.

This extraordinary figure bears similarities to Ralph Fiennes’s Chef Slowik in the 2022 movie The Menu. These men are cooking to a dark menu. Another movie that comes to mind is one of Marlon Brando’s final ones, The Freshman from 1990.

Aoy joins Hunger because she wants to lift her family out of borderline poverty. She also wants to be “someone special” who is recognised for her cooking skills.

The scenes where she and the other permanently terrified members of the kitchen practise preparing the meals, to make sure all is perfect before they are cooked on site, are, excuse the pun, knife-edge with tension.

Indeed, there are so many sharp blades and barely-controlled fires in this gleaming practice kitchen, located in a high-rise building, that viewers will wonder who is going to be cut or burned or both.

This anticipation of what is to come is one of the impressive aspects of this 130-minute movie, which is directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri and written by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee.

Bad things do happen, but perhaps not the ones that are expected.

Underneath the overarching story of the two chefs are sociopolitical issues such as the military’s influence in Thailand, the gluttony of capitalism – the food wasted in the practice sessions would feed Aoy’s family for a month – and the exploitation of animals. I watched this movie soon after seeing EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s account of the life of a donkey, and each left permanent impressions.

Aoy’s food made with love is a simple noodle dish that has been in her family for generations. Here there is an echo of the 1994 Taiwanese movie Eat Drink Man Woman.

Yet she has anger issues of her own. This rebellious disciple and her wrathful god come face-to-face in an astonishing, extended scene that merges cooking and art.

They wield blades and pans, their armour, at a socialite’s birthday extravaganza. Aoy goes for the humble but soulful while Chef Paul morphs into the Damien Hirst of haute cuisine. For this scene alone the filmmakers deserve three Michelin stars.

This is a dark film but it is not without romance or humour. At one point Chef Paul is shown some hospital food. His reaction is excessive but even so it’s 30 seconds of his life where he feels the same as the rest of us.