The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

Day 29 of Sobriety. 

I was looking forward to The Pope’s Exorcist. I often like movies based around the themes of possession and exorcism, and my impression was that this film was going to present a fresh, contemporary take on those themes. It started well enough, with Russell Crowe stepping into the role of Father Gabriele Amorth—a rather unconventional Italian priest with a penchant for somewhat off-color wisecracks.

The character of Father Gabriele Amorth is, of course, based on the real priest and exorcist of the same name, who passed away as recently as 2016. He authored a number of books on demonology and exorcism, and that is where the inspiration for The Pope’s Exorcist was drawn. For some reason Crowe’s rendition of Father Amorth kept putting me in mind of Ricky Gervais. I think it might have been the delivery of his frequent witty rebuttals to those who tried to question or undermine him.

 

As you would expect of a Russell Crowe vehicle, the film is slickly made and well photographed, but I found the ironic use of pop and rock songs throughout to be a bit cheesy and jarring. I generally prefer my horror movies to be played absolutely straight, and I find that kind of "wink, wink" use of music detracts from the atmosphere. It was also nice to see Italian stalwart Franco Nero playing the pope, although he must have been internally cringing at some of the other cast members’ ropey Italian accents. The characters in the film switched between speaking Italian and English at several points, presumably to lend some kind of authenticity to its Italian setting. The fact that some thought was given to authenticity is commendable, I suppose, but the result was ultimately just a bit distracting, particularly as some of the reasons used for the dialogue switch only served to highlight the fact that everyone was suddenly speaking English. For example “The possessed boy is speaking English—a language he does not know!” or, “We will conduct this Vatican hearing in English because…” (whatever the reason was).

Again, perhaps I only have myself to blame for expecting The Pope’s Exorcist to be something that it wasn’t, but as the film progressed, and the well-trodden exorcism movie tropes got piled on ever-thicker and faster, it rapidly dawned on me that this was not going to be the innovative post-modern take on the sub-genre that I was anticipating. On the contrary, it played more like a checklist of the most well-worn cliches. Child speaking profanities in scary “demon” voice—check, projectile vomit—check, people being telekinetically thrown around the room—check, possessed child doing weird, contorted spider-walk—check, cross on the wall spinning upside-down—check… and on, and on. On top of that, the heavy-handed use of CG was the icing on a very dull cake.

 

I really wanted to like this movie, but by the end I was so disillusioned and bored that I didn’t really care what was happening on the screen. Apparently there is a sequel in the works.