Knock on Wood

Wasted potential is my least favorite thing. It can be painful watching a film or a show that makes all the wrong choices, that could have been great had it taken a different path. It’s even worse to see proven talent try their best to salvage a trainwreck and be woefully unsuccessful.

The Exorcism is not a trainwreck in the traditional sense. Actually, on paper, it’s a fantastic idea – a respected actor, Anthony Miller, (Russell Crowe), also an alcoholic grieving the loss of his wife, is cast in a supernatural horror film after its director mysteriously dies and his daughter Lee (Fear Street’s Ryan Simpkins) is suspended from high school. Horrific antics ensue – the possession in the film-within-a-film begins to come to life, and Miller’s past returns to haunt him.

Conceptually, it could be brilliant – but how does one pull it off? The Exorcism annoyingly plays everything rigidly straight, constantly basking in its self-seriousness. It’s a self-styled character drama with a demonic twist, but the characters and their conflicts are so surface-level that it’s a struggle to care, and the horror is banal to the point of boredom. It’s very well-shot and competently-produced, and first-time feature director Joshua John Miller (son of Jason Miller, who played Father Karras in Friedkin’s original Exorcist) seems content with mood-setting, which is a respectable goal, but if that’s the only goal? It’s probably not conducive to an entire feature film.

Francis Ford Coppola once said that “Good acting and writing are the oxygen and hydrogen of cinema. If you don’t have either of them, it will be impossible to have a good movie, and if you have both of them, then other weaknesses will be almost irrelevant.” The Exorcism is blessed with a quartet of excellent performers – Crowe (who has an undeniable natural gravitas) and Simpkins (a star with a definite future) are both very good, and Chloe Bailey and David Hyde Pierce have dynamic presence as Lee’s love interest Blake and priest consultant Father Conor, respectively. The film utterly falls apart when it comes down to the script, which creeps along at a snail’s pace without much tangible escalation until the very end, at which point I had a very strong feeling of “too little, too late.”

I can’t claim I had high hopes for The Exorcism, but I still felt let down. What could have been a delightfully meta concept that toys with expectations about the entertainment industry (or even a super-meta quasi-sequel to Crowe’s The Pope’s Exorcist) is instead an unbearably extreme slow burn that tries and fails to keep pace with itself. In a movie that should be centered around the parallels between Anthony Miller’s life and his character’s story, there’s instead a rinse-and-repeat slog that occasionally punctuates the silence with loud noises that are supposed to constitute as jump scares. We barely even know anything about the film-within-a-film, which is supposed to be framing Miller’s arc – and The Exorcism even borrows the ending of Friedkin’s original film, which clearly it owes a lot to!

A bizarre amount of unanswered questions and a fiery climax it does not earn in the slightest are the sour cherries on top of the hacky assembly of missteps that is The Exorcism. The bones of a far more interesting story about a cursed film can be seen (and are even hinted at in the film’s official tagline), but are unfortunately absent in the finished product. The Exorcism is by no means an unwatchable movie, but it is a forgettable one. Fans of horror and good cinema alike should be wary.

The Exorcism is playing in theaters now.