The possessive here indicates that the exorcist belongs to the pope (as in, he’s the pope’s top guy), not that the pope needs someone to exorcise him. Now that would be an interesting concept for a movie!
I love this blog. I love writing about horror movies as much, if not more, than I love writing about music. It is a fact, though, that the demands of 31 Movies for 31 Days impact the ways that I think and talk about horror. My wife and I were recently chatting with friends and bandying about entertainment recommendations, and the topic of scary movies came up. My wife was recalling films we had recently watched and recommending the ones that she liked – you know, like a reasonable person having that type of conversation. I found myself hemming and hawing after each recommendation, however, only willing to settle on the movies of the highest objective quality to receive my endorsement. I couldn’t turn off the critical part of my brain and separate a casual conversation from all of the analysis that I had performed on these movies. The Pope’s Exorcist is an interesting case in point on the topic.
The Catholic Church is divided on the concept of demonic possession. Russell Crowe, their most experienced exorcist, understands that the vast majority of cases are really just mental health related, but he has seen enough throughout his career to know that demons are very real.* That appears to be the case with his latest assignment, the possession of a pre-teen boy who lives with his mother and sister in Spain. Crowe has to team with an overmatched local priest to uncover the identity of the powerful demon, protect the small family, and reckon with his own guilt over past mistakes.
If I had to pick a single descriptor for The Pope’s Exorcist, it might be lackadaisical. The film doesn’t aim to bring anything new to the exorcism genre, which is fine, but it also doesn’t try too hard to do the exorcism genre particularly well. The possessed boy, a combination of a child actor and a superimposed demonic voice, is simply not scary. Moreover, the film spends zero energy on fostering investment in the family and their well-being, so even if the threat was more believable, you would be hard pressed to care. The movie does have two assets, however. The first is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is not afraid to be kind of funny, kind of irreverent, and leans towards fun more than terror. If that weren’t true, then the film’s lack of scares would prove insurmountable. The other asset is Crowe himself. He is clearly having a blast playing the titular character, and seems to naturally intuit what type of movie he is in, and perhaps more importantly, the type of movie he is not. His constant presence makes the proceedings imminently watchable, and the few scenes that don’t involve him suffer in comparison.
If I compare The Pope’s Exorcist to Infinity Pool, another flawed movie that I have reviewed this month, the latter movie is better by pretty much every measure except for one. Yet in some ways, that measure is the only one that actually matters: How much I enjoyed it. I can point to all of the ways that The Pope’s Exorcist falls short, and that really is a part of what I’m meant to be doing here, but the fact is that I was entertained while I watched it. I could easily watch it again, something that I will never do with many of the movies I review (including the superior-on-paper Infinity Pool). And, I suppose, that ought to be the only bar that a movie has to clear to earn a personal recommendation from me as well.
* The whole exorcism sub-genre, as prevalent in American horror as zombies or haunted houses or any other type of spooky story archetype, is kind of fascinating when you think about it. It seems fairly obvious to me that the demons that were exorcised in New Testament books like Acts are most likely mental health issues that the books’ authors didn’t have the medical understanding or language to describe in those terms. Yet the concept of demonic possession has endured in pop culture for two millennia. In fact, there are plenty in the Christian community that can’t fathom the idea of a non-literal interpretation of such things despite the fact that Jesus himself taught and preached almost exclusively through metaphor during his short time on Earth.
Comments