The Exorcism film review: Damned if this isn’t a bit of a waste
This is Russell Crowe’s second crack at a devil-be-damned movie, following The Pope’s Exorcist in 2023. He’s solid for the first hour – but things go downhill from there.
‘I am a bit rusty,’’ the once-famous action movie star Anthony Miller (Russell Crowe) tells his teenage daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) as they read lines from a script. It might be said the same applies to “Rusty” Crowe, who won an Oscar in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and has not had a hit for a while. It would be going too far to agree with the director who hires Miller, who asks the make-up artist: “Have you got a spatula? You can seal the fact the motherf..ker can’t act.”
The meta factor – a film in which an actor plays an actor making a film – is the strongest, and most humorous, element of The Exorcism, directed by American actor turned filmmaker Joshua John Miller.
It’s Crowe’s second crack at a devil-be-damned movie, following The Pope’s Exorcist in 2023. He’s solid for the first hour, when the movie is about making a movie, but struggles when the plot moves more towards The Exorcist of 1973 fame.
Miller needs the job because he has spent the past two years on a drugs and booze bender following the death of his wife. He admits he used his wife’s cancer to say “f..k you” to the world and everyone in it.
That included his daughter, who is back living with him in New York after being kicked out of school.
He’s signed up to make a horror movie about demonic possession. He is the priest, the would-be exorcist. An actor named Blake (Chloe Bailey) plays the possessed girl. An actor named Joe (Australia’s Sam Worthington) plays the junior priest. It is fun watching the two Australian actors talk about their careers while adjusting their clerical collars. “You as a priest!” Miller’s daughter exclaims. “The mind reels.” Meanwhile, Sam Worthington confesses to Russell Crowe: “I never wanted to be an actor.”
David Hyde Pierce, ever famous as Niles Crane in the 1993-2004 sitcom Frasier, plays a real priest hired as a consultant to the film. “Just alcohol,’’ he says when an assistant asks him if he’d like something to drink.
There’s an undercurrent about the Catholic Church and child abuse that should have been taken further. Miller was an altar boy, in Australia I think, though it’s not specified, and the priests did something to him, “down there”, as the director puts it.
This film, co-written by the director and his writing and life partner MA Fortin, has the ingredients of a strong drama but it fails to pull them together.
The New Zealand-born Australian cinematographer, Simon Duggan, who also shot Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in cinemas now, doesn’t have a lot to work with.
Miller is told by his director (Adam Goldberg) that he’s in a “psychological drama wrapped in the skin of a horror movie”. The same can be said for this movie about a movie. The potential for mind games, and the existing meta humour, is why I have given it three stars.
The final third, however, the horror movie skin is all we see and it isn’t pretty to look at. Indeed, as I watched Crowe and Pierce dance around with a devil they didn’t know, the most repeated words of the script came back to me: “Lord have mercy.”
The Exorcism (MA15+)
96 minutes
In cinemas
★★★
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