The Last Exorcism
There's probably no cinematic experience more frustrating than when you go to see a movie, and it turns out to be much more than you expect - against all odds, it's an engaging, well-directed, well-acted, well-written story - only to have it all fall apart in the last few minutes. If I put my mind to it, I could probably come up with dozens of titles over the years that have fit this description (many of them horror films, a genre notorious for awful endings), and it actually pains me deeply to have to add The Last Exorcism to that list: a movie that turns out to be merely good when it could have been great.
Director Daniel Stamm and producer Eli Roth have crafted an intriguing tale, presented to us in the form of "found footage" a la Cloverfield and Blair Witch Project. The film's central character is the Rev. Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a minister from a family of ministers. But he's a little bit different; he sees - and exploits - the superficiality of preaching. A master showman, Marcus is charismatic and charming, and his sermons are utterly convincing to his flock despite the fact that he has long sinced ceased to believe his own words. One of his side-businesses is the practice of exorcisms, and Marcus has practically made a science out of it: he shows up with a few convincing props and some loudly-voiced words of prayer, and ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, demons begone.
Using his charms to fool the gullible has always come easy, but Marcus has become tired of the hypocrisy of it all. Wanting to prove once and for all just how full-of-beans the concept of demonic possession is, he hires a film crew and heads for backwoods Louisiana (a place that's scary enough without supernatural goings-on) to prove just how little it takes to pull off a convincing exorcism. But this wouldn't be a viable horror movie if things went exactly as planned, would it?
Marcus meets farmer Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) and his kids, son Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) and Nell (Ashley Bell). Caleb is, at first glance, a very disturbed young man, but it's actually Nell that Marcus is there to see. Following the death of her mother, Nell has become isolated, sullen and withdrawn. She appears innocent as the proverbial newborn lamb, but Louis suspects that she's been killing the farm animals, and naturally, associates that with demonic possession. Marcus immediately goes to work: he dots his I's, crosses his T's, and the girl... against all odds, actually gets worse. Nell starts drawing disturbingly violent pictures and muttering to herself in her room at night, and finally, all you-know-what breaks loose.
I will say this: Fabian and Bell are nothing short of terrific in their roles. Fabien plays Marcus - a role that Stamm actually takes the time to develop, and the film is much richer for it - with a charm and cynicism that's almost pathological. He's arrogant but not so much that we hate him for it. And Bell treads the line between subdued and cliched with remarkable ease for someone with as little acting experience as she has. Despite what impressions you may have gotten from the trailer, which shows Nell's skeletal structure being bent into some very unnatural angles, it really is unclear whether there's supernatural powers at work within her - that is, up until the end, which I will not reveal.
It always boggles my mind when screenwriters can put together a story that's so brilliantly understated, visceral and creepy in all the right places for a full ninety minutes, but can't come up with a denouement that even comes close to matching it. As I said, it's difficult to come up with truly satisfying endings in horror movies, but I daresay a first-year film student could have come up with a better one than Stamm did.
I would still recommend this film, if you are the kind of filmgoer to whom the journey is more important than the destination. If, one the other hand, if your tastes are all about how a movie climaxes, then The Last Exorcism is probably not for you.
More's the pity.
3 1/2 / 5 stars
Second Opinion by Ryan Sarver:
Only two types of horror movie have ever scared me—exorcisms and house-hauntings. More specifically, The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror crept deep into my mind as I watched them, digging out little niches where they could jump out as I laid in bed at night, making everything, from the shadow of a chair to the creaking of settling floorboards, completely shit-your-pants horrifying. There isn’t anything especially gory or shocking in either film, at least by today’s standards; it’s the scenario—the notion of something unearthly and entirely uncontrollable entering our lives and corrupting our homes and selves—that makes these movies so scary. So it was with great reluctance that I walked into Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism, a film that walks the line between possession drama and horror mockumentary. Its PG-13 schlock begs to be pushed into R territory—is restrained by Nell’s (Ashley Bell) saccharine personality and an utter lack of anything frightening beyond the occasional boom mic malfunction.
Nell watches a screener of The Last Exorcism
Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) is a Southern minister facing doubts over the legitimacy of exorcism and Christianity itself; after years of performing exorcisms reliant on parlor tricks and hidden speakers, he’s forced to question his practice once stories spread of a young boy’s suffocation at the hands of his exorcising minister. Hoping to save the lives of countless children from evangelical families, he invites a documentary crew to film his final exorcism for widespread theatrical release. As Marcus and his crew draw closer to the supposedly possessed Sweetzer farm, they collect folklore from the locals about cults, UFO landings, and cattle slayings. Upon arriving they’re met by Louis (Louis Herthum), father of Caleb, a young boy with a penchant for throwing muddy rocks, and Nell, the demonic focus of the film. From here it’s a simple matter of Marcus busting out his Batman-esque Holy Gadgetry, from bed hydraulics to smoking cross, to convince Louis that his daughter has been purified. But when Nell shows up in Marcus’s hotel room the night after her exorcism, catatonic and despondent, the minister realizes he may have bit off more than he can chew.
The Last Exorcism takes every generic twist you can imagine; there’s the immediate referral to psychiatry, implied family trauma, faux healing, and even a little antichrist sacrificing tossed in for good measure. It’s a by-the-numbers possession sleeper with more laughs than jumps—though Ashley Bell contorts into some pretty interesting positions, she can’t twist her face into anything approaching the level of horror achieved by Caleb throwing a few rocks at Marcus’s SUV. She has too much fun playing the host of an ancient demon—constantly looks like she’s in on some joke, as if the film was going to eventually commit to its mockumentary roots and outwardly reveal the tortured girl schtick as nothing but piss-poor acting. This combined with the minister’s constant sarcasm and religious self-reproach make for a pretty hilarious film. The final scene takes on a particularly Blair Witch vibe, but reveals too little and relies too much on implication than fear. I suppose the Exorcism subgenre is by its nature reliant on implication—depends on fear of the unseen and uncontrollable to play with its audiences’ emotions—but with this film you never see a corpse or anything close to a possession. Instead you’re treated to some bad kids’ drawings, a doe-eyed girl trying really hard not to laugh at herself, and one of the corniest, predictable endings in recent Horror cinema. It’s not an awful film—you’ll laugh a lot and walk away happy. Just don’t expect to be frightened.
