Rating: 3/5
Basic concept; sham exorcist accidentally attends a real exorcism — or is it!?!?
Ashley Bell is so good in this. She has to do a lot with her character, and she pulls it off
Amazing first act, one of the most satisfying openings to an exorcism movie
Stray Thoughts
- Doing card tricks in your sermon is so funny
- Baby Caleb Landry Jones — even then, playing angry kid, because he’s really good at it. I love how into it he is once he knows the reverend is a fraud
** SPOILERS** This commits a sin that a lot of movies do, where it gets to the last 10 minutes and thinks it needs one more twist (or cascade of twists)
The movie up until that point does a good job of showing how mental illness can manifest, and the ways in which this type of insular upbringing can persuade individuals into thinking they are possessed…
And then in the last 10 minutes they turn it into a Rosemary’s Baby, undercutting the work they had done for the sake of a cheap twist. It’s for that reason that I can’t rate the movie higher