The Exorcism

After Russell Crowe hammed his way through the dismally dumb schlock and box office success of The Pope’s Exorcist, one could imagine he took on a film called The Exorcism because it’s easy money. Or he got the scripts confused, who knows?

Yet there’s far more at play here than is to be expected from what looks like a formulaic fear-filled potboiler. If anything, the setup for The Exorcism feels similar to that of Takashi Miike’s theatrical chiller Over Your Dead Body, both films being about a production of a classic horror story that finds itself blurring the lines between performance and possession. In Miike’s case, it’s seminal Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, the progenitor of the long-haired woman trope. For The Exorcism, it’s The Exorcist, the high holy of demonic possession movies.

The Exorcism looks like a conventional modern horror movie, and at points is one. In reality it’s close to JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 2008 self-excoriation and dismantling of his tough guy persona; similarly, it’s in the melding of Crowe’s character in The Exorcism and his offscreen persona that the film comes alive. As Anthony, an aging actor on the comeback trail, Crowe comes surprisingly close to his own troubles: The once-great star, the burly tough guy who’s destroyed his relationships and career through being a notorious boozer. Now he’s slumming it in mid-budget horror playing a priest who must exorcise a young woman played by former TV star Blake Holloway (Bailey), while the real Anthony is trying to stay sober and fix the compound fractured relationship with his daughter, Lee (Simpkins).

Crowe’s presence almost seems a reaction to The Pope’s Exorcist, the highly fictionalized biopic of real papal exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, especially when considering Crowe’s own deeply held Catholic beliefs. Ignoring all that is like watching Crowe’s 2020 road rage thriller Unhinged and not seeing how it plays with his own well-publicized outbursts of violence.

But there’s not merely the metatextuality of Crowe playing a Crowe-esque figure; there’s also Joshua John Miller – the son of Jason Miller, who played Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist – directing the script he wrote with his partner, M.A. Fortin. And it extends not just to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by the demon Pazuzu, but to the whole setup. The script was originally called The Georgetown Project (a reference to the 1973 classic’s filming location and setting); the set feels like a duplicate of the MacNeil’s fancy home; Adam Goldberg plays a Friedkinesque director who is not above emotional abuse to get the take he wants; and a superstitious conviction runs rampant among the cast and crew that weird things happen on sets like this. There’s a sense of Miller working through his own father’s experience, while also taking potshots at the film business itself. When Goldberg’s director melts down because Anthony looks like too haggard and rough to play a priest, he does so without noting that the film’s clerical advisor, Father Conor (the first film performance from a sorely missed David Hyde Pierce since 2010’s The Perfect Host), looks like he’s been sleeping rough for the last few weeks.

All this interconnectedness and referentiality seems to sit at odds with a final act that makes a definitive decision about whether the supernatural is real or just a metaphor for Anthony’s inner quagmire of self-doubt, self-hate, and remorse. Yet as The Exorcism becomes the kind of schlock Anthony fears he will end up making, it almost feels like Miller is poking the audience in the eye for wanting nothing more from Crowe than CG-enhanced shouting. The metatext is vaporized in a dull third act that’s just as idiotic as, well, The Pope’s Exorcist. Whether it’s just a failed tonal shift, or Miller overstretches on his intention, it makes the complete film a ghost of the dark magic it summoned in its earlier portrait of a flawed artist. The only question is whether that artist is Anthony or Crowe.