Where I Watched it: Netflix

English Audio Description?: Yes

Are you sitting at home watching a film where a creepy child is speaking in an unnatural voice and for some reason crosses are being turned upside down? Did they summon a priest? Is someone clutching a rosary? Are they reading biblical text in Latin?

If you weren’t watching a movie, I’d say you were having a pretty typical Tuesday night. But, you are definitely stuck in an exorcism movie.

Perhaps more so than any horror sub genre, this one has the most obvious tropes. The Conjuring is the closest thing to breaking the mold I can think of by having someone who isn’t an actual priest on hand. It’s just this well read paranormal couple. But luckily for you, this exorcist is about the only reason to watch this.

Russell Crowe is fully invested in this role, giving an old Italian man performance for the ages. his exorcist also truly seems to give zero fucks. He’s ready to crack a joke, and he’s not afraid to stare a demon in the face. The movie wants you to know he is not standard operating procedure through his creative exorcism in the opening scene, as well as a later moment where the Cardinals (who are played by some of the worst actors in Hollywood) berate him and threaten to get rid of him. Again, he just shrugs it off. Zero fucks, remember?

But, sadly, there’s a family… and a kid… and a possession. So, he has to go do his thing. And the director of the film also wants you to know, he thinks this genre sucks too, and needs a bit of levity. The child is first possessed and asks for his mom to call the priest. So, she does, but it’s just the local guy, which leads to a hilarious moment where something happens, and the little possessed boy (looking for Crowe) retorts “wrong priest.”

the problem is that this levity comes and goes, and the director never maintains it. If you look at something recent like Evil Dead Rise, which followed the typical screwed up nature of the franchise while also having those darkly funny moments, you can see it maintain that tone the whole film. It’s never really a comedy, but it has enough to do some chuckling. Here, it’s so random.

Then, even after Crowe gets there, the movie not only doesn’t maintain its tone, but it also starts to not make sense. There’s an exorcism we are given no context to that apparently haunts Crowe, with no backstory. There’s this weird Indiana Jones type of moment where Crowe and Wrong Priest find themselves… somewhere. I won’t spoil it, but it does feel like they should be hunting for the Ark. The longer the movie goes, the worse it gets.

The final ten minutes or so are just so bizarre. it’s like this movie was trying so hard to not be an Exorcist movie that it was experimenting with other genres. I’m half surprised the kid and Crowe didn’t start to solve crimes together or something.

On the audio description front, I’d say don’t watch this without it. There are moments we got that need audio description, like messages carved into the boys skin like stigmata that we wouldn’t be able to see. Plus, it is a horror film, and you want to know what those scary images look like don’t you?

At the same time, i kinda feel like the narration is simplistic. There were times, especially in the third act, where you could just hear loud noises and screaming, plus some random sound effects like a storm was brewing or wind was swirling, selling you on the idea that some major stuff was going down. Yet, the description for what happened always kinda deflated what we saw, like it was the easiest thing to describe in the whole world.

Russell Crowe is absolutely inside this performance the whole time. It was like he truly believed this one performance would revive his career and send him to the A-list. He’s almost entertaining enough to warrant watching the film. But they really saved on money by hiring a barrage of terrible actors to surround him, the film has a fun tone that is terribly inconsistent, and suffers from an overindulgent writer who wants more from this film, but doesn’t have the ability to earn anything, rather just dumping backstory on you without context, and an entire third act that is wildly different from the rest of the movie.

This may be based on a real guy, but I feel like Hollywood took some liberties, and those liberties made his story worse.

Final Grade: C+