Follow Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s leading exorcist, as he investigates the possession of a child and uncovers a conspiracy the Vatican has tried to keep secret.
Demonic possession has been a staple in Hollywood for decades. What better way to scare audiences than to present a story about an innocent young boy or girl being taken over by a maleficent demon or evil spirit? There have been some truly terrible iterations; “The Order,” “Exorcist: The Beginning,” and “The Devil Inside,” to name but a few, but there have also been some truly scary cinematic masterpieces; “The Exorcist,” its second sequel, “The Exorcist III,” “The Conjuring 1 & 2,” and “Insidious.”
With “The Pope’s Exorcist,” director Julius Avery takes on the real-life Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief Vatican exorcist from 1992 until he died in 2016. While some people I have spoken to insist the film is based on a true story, it is not. Russell Crowe’s interpretation of Father Amorth is praiseworthy, but the story is pure fiction. The filmmakers took fragments and snippets from Father Amorth’s notes and memoirs over the years and created a fictional narrative, but because it is based on a real-life priest, many people assume that the story must also be genuine. Ah, the magic of Hollywood.
A young American mother, Julia (Alex Essoe), her teenage daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden), and young son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), move from the US to Spain to take possession of a mysterious old Spanish abbey that was left to them in her husband’s will after he died in a car crash. Almost immediately, strange things begin to happen. Some workers restoring the abbey end up in the hospital after a mysterious explosion in the basement, but after they leave, Henry starts behaving bizarrely, becoming physical with his mother and sister. Julia knows nobody in the area except for the local priest, Father Thomas Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), and calls on him for help, but after speaking with Henry, he thinks he may be possessed.
Thomas reaches out to the Vatican and requests a priest with expertise in demonic possession to come to the house but is shocked when Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe) turns up at their front door, well-versed in him and his reputation. Amorth interviews Henry and, after several interactions with him, informs Thomas that the boy appears to be possessed. Because Henry is so young, Amorth tells Thomas they must move fast to uncover the demon’s name so they can have power over it and free the boy, but locating that information proves most challenging. After an excursion to the basement, both men discover the location is pure evil and that the church covered up events that transpired there hundreds of years ago. After locating a diary written by a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, who was also an exorcist, they unearth the demon’s name and return to battle with it before it’s too late.
“The Pope’s Exorcist” is teeming with all the familiar tropes and components utilized in films of this ilk, but that’s not necessarily bad. Bulging black eyes, pained, guttural, deep demonic voices, and levitating people and objects, we are all accustomed to these elements in such movies, but when done correctly, they can have a very frightening effect on our psyche. Why? Because most of us, more than likely, have never experienced a real-life exorcism, and hopefully never will, so a demonic possession and its consequences are left in the hands of the filmmakers. After all, if it worked for “The Exorcist” and “The Conjuring,” why wouldn’t it work here too?
The human connection is the other side of the believability factor in a film like this. We have to believe the people experiencing these horrific events, and Russell Crowe leads an ensemble cast who do their parts superbly. Externally, Crowe imbues Amorth with a sly sense of humor, using jokes to break any tension, but internally, he lives with the pain of a past case that continues to haunt him many years later. Young actor Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, as the possessed Henry, gives a performance filled with torment and ferocity, one to rival Linda Blair’s in “The Exorcist,” his young and innocent face gradually giving way to a snarling, violent, and foulmouthed hellion whose only purpose is to destroy Henry and those near and dear to him.
While “The Pope’s Exorcist” offers nothing new in the Demonic Possession genre, it does have a few genuinely scary moments. The film feels like the beginning of a new horror franchise for Sony Pictures, similar to The Conjuring Universe, created by James Wan. If that is the case, it could be an interesting one, as Father Amorth is said to have performed over 30,000 exorcisms, and I’m sure there are a few stories in there just begging to be freed!
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