New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

The Movie

The film constructs a narrative established by the world described in the book. Colin O'Donoghue plays Michael Kovac — a man who worked in a mortuary alongside his father, played by Rutger Hauer. Kovac is a dramatically enhanced version of Father Gary Thomas. O'Donoghue has a bit of James Dean in his stride as he drifts into seminary school out of sheer uncertainty. His performance is interesting enough to hold his place in the film as a chance encounter with a dying woman on the street complicates his desire to drop out of the seminary. Kovac’s compassionately rumpled student advisor Father Matthew (briefly played by Toby Jones in the single most interesting performance of the film) suggests that he go off to study exorcism in Rome, then decide if he really wants to drop out of the priesthood.

Filmed on location in Budapest and Rome, the location that bleeds in through the background of the film is nicely atmospheric once its protagonist leaves America. There are a few classroom scenes that establish Kovac as a sharp and shrewd skeptic. Excorcist instructor Father Xavier takes note of Kovac’s skepticism and promptly sends him off on assignment to visit with a seasoned practicing exorcist Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins.) With Toby Jones bringing in the single most appealing performance in the film, Hopkins’ early scenes come in kind of a close second. Here he’s playing kind of a weary iconoclast — shades of a darker version of his performance in The World’s Fastest Indian. That charm fades out as the standard Hollywood plot structure runs its course. Before long, Hopkins’ exorcist is suffering from demonic possession of his own as he drifts into a version of Hannibal Lecter that can’t help but be mildly comical in spite of itself. Even an actor of Hopkins’ caliber can’t help screenwriter Michael Petroni’s tremendously goofy version of Baal — one of the seven princes of Hell.

Between Baal and a mildly haunting performance by Italian actress Marta Gastini as a demonically possessed pregnant woman, the film compromises the book’s mundane look at the process of exorcism with something a bit more Hollywood. These demons manifest themselves in ways that appear suitably dramatic for the big screen, but without all the head swiveling and projectile vomiting that would make it all seem excessively silly. The biggest departure here seems to be the exorcists’ continual questioning of the demon to attempt to ascertain its name. The theory here is that, if you know the true name of a demon, that gives you power over it. The problem with this as cited in Baglio’s book is that demons do tend to lie — about everything. If a young woman at a bar isn’t going to tell some obnoxious guy her real name, there’s really no reason to believe a demon would reveal its real name to someone who wants to cut short its vacation in Italy. It’s a particularly dramatic moment in the film when a valiantly empowered Kovac demands the name of the demon inhabiting the body of Anthony Hopkins — the one causing hime to act so silly. And rather than come right out and say the name of screenwriter Michael Petroni, Hopkins dramatically expels air in a moan that resonates into the name of Baal. It’s a dramatic moment, but it betrays the duplicitous nature of the demon that seemed so incapable of telling the truth — so ingenious at lying. It’s dramatic, but it sort of weakens the whole film. And so it goes into the closing credits in a very traditional Hollywood trajectory…

The Verdict

While it’s far from being completely pointless, Matt Baglio’s The Rite lacks the kind of depth and insight that would make it a truly interesting work of journalism. Inspired by the world described in Baglio’s book, the film relates a story that theoretically could’ve been compelling if it bothered to follow some of the book’s finer details just a little bit closer. As it stands, neither film nor book are particularly satisfying. Baglio’s The Rite reads like particularly promising notes for a film that never really ended up getting made. Had those notes been available in their entirety to a screenwriter with a more ingenious design for bringing them to the screen, the film could’ve been a quasi-fictional crystallization of an uneven, uninspired work of nonfiction. There’s no questioning that the subject matter of modern exorcism could have the potential for being interesting on some level, but neither Baglio nor the screenwriter manage to muster enough inspiration to deliver on that potential.

Continued:       1       2       3