I Just Saw

I just saw The Pope’s Exorcist and it was really funny, which I guess is a shame as it wasn’t trying to be, I don’t think. It stars Russell Crowe as the real-life Father Amorth, who in the late 1980s visits a Spanish abbey being renovated by an American widow when a demon possesses one of her children.

For such a well-populated genre, the Catholic possession movie has maybe two entries that are worth seeing: The Exorcist, and The Exorcist III. Everything else is either amusing trash or absolute tedium. The Pope’s Exorcist falls into the former category. These movies seem to be borrowing tropes from the cop genre these days, hence why in place of the police chief who doesn’t like the main detective’s unorthodox ways and wants him off the case, we now have the cardinal who chews out the exorcist for… conducting exorcisms. (And who insists on conducting papal business in English for some reason.)

One amusing aspect of the film is how little time it spends on establishing its non-Catholic characters before the demonic shenanigans start. The mother and children are characterised according to slasher cliches: the teenage daughter wears revealing clothes and smokes cigarettes, and the little boy always wears a Walkman and is mute. (Which saves time giving him dialogue or characterising him at all.) At a certain point, the film just dismisses them from the narrative, as if not realising that the point of the possession was its effect on the little boy. A cardinal lets us know what happened to them, though. So… erm, that’s nice.

This is illustrative of how the screenplay borrows ideas from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist without understanding their function and purpose. You don’t need to be an expert in Catholic theology to see why they work in The Exorcist but not here.

We get the scene where the child is taken to medical professionals to diagnose a possible brain disorder, and where he spews obscenities at and assaults his mother. When Pazuzu the demon did this to Regan it was, in the words of Max von Sydow’s exorcist, to make people lose hope, seeing how easily a child can be brutalised for the purposes of evil.

The demon in The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t have as much of a personality and when the child uses foul language, it’s frankly hilarious. Early on the little boy grabs his mother’s chest and rants about breastfeeding, and all it evokes is Eddie Murphy as a baby in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, grabbing a woman’s chest and yelling “Got milk?!” I may have ruined the atmosphere in the cinema by laughing out loud.

Another borrowed moment is when writing appears on the child’s stomach, produced by someone raising the skin from inside him. In The Exorcist it was Regan herself writing, pleading for help from some godforsaken realm. Here it’s the demon, crowing about how God isn’t here like an edgy boy who’s listened to too much goth metal.

Russell Crowe’s performance is fun, presenting the exorcist as a garrulous and eccentric patriarchal figure with a weakness for bad jokes. This is also a pretty well-shot film with some decent effects work evoking the abbey and Inquisition-era catacombs beneath it. A Scooby-Doo plot about the abbey’s history develops and provides the story’s most interesting material, including an excuse for the Spanish Inquisition that’s probably more appealing to the Vatican than unbiased historians. You can see why the Catholic Church is unofficially okay with these movies, which assume that the faith is based on truth and the church’s supremacy correct, even if sometimes subject to bureaucracy.

The film understands its cheesiness to a degree. A woman’s head is slammed against a sink so hard that the sink shatters, yet she barely has a concussion, and a priest’s lost romance is used as an excuse to get bare breasts into the story. I seriously doubt that any of this has anything to do with the real Father Amorth, especially the special effects climax, but it’s amusing junk.