The Exorcism

(Joshua John Miller, USA, 2024)

A very large book could be written today about the ever-twisting fate, in history, of the concept of hesitation in horror/fantasy cinema. According to Tzvetan Todorov’s influential 1970 book The Fantastic – I’ve been happily using it since the age of 19 – hesitation names the existence of two distinct interpretations of events in a fiction that are held in tension, and usually resolved (by the ending) in one direction or the other: a rational account, and a supernatural version. Very often, it comes down to a formula like this: are the aliens/phantoms/strange events real, or is it all in the hero’s head?

Subtitled (in its 1975 English translation) “a structural approach to a literary genre”, The Fantastic has the alluring virtue of offering a template, solid yet flexible, that fits very many examples (in his corpus, from Arabian Nights and E.T.A. Hoffman to Poe and Kafka) – and can be extended holus bolus to film, from Val Lewton to The Birds (1963), from Larry Cohen to M. Night Shyamalan, and well beyond.

If anything, cinema magnified the scope of the hesitation idea by literally multiplying it: alongside (or within) the broad rational and supernatural categories, we find ecological, technological, synchronistic (in the Jungian sense) and religious-spiritual explanations (among many others) of increasingly strange, mind-boggling events …

Hence, for instance, the case of a movie such as Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011), in which what we have probably assumed all along is a character’s paranoiac phantasm turns out to be a prediction of apocalyptic reality. Or, more far-out, a ‘cinema of hysteria’ case such as William Friedkin’s great Bug (2006), where the central hesitation (between psychological madness and evolutionary-bug-infestation-of-humanity) shifts its polarity so often and so fast that we have no better idea what’s really going on in the last shot as in the first shot (which are, more or less, the same shot, and sound: the infernal circle of non-interpretability!).

At a certain point in horror/sci-fi movie history – particularly in its most artistically ambitious exemplars – hesitation also gets ineluctably drawn into an almighty torsion regarding what are popularly known as subtexts (supposedly ‘hidden’ meanings) or, more broadly, dramatic metaphors. (Prepare to encounter a lot of muddled, confused, inaccurate thinking about these terms when you dive into the churning sea of nerdy ‘explainer’ criticism.)

Take an important milestone in this evolution such as Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004): the wacky, supernatural explanation of the plot turns out to be supremely revealing (in a distorted, psychoanalytic fashion) of traces of the hero’s primal sexual abuse, which is the film’s ‘true’, bedrock reality. Here, omnipresent social trauma – and trauma theory, as well – serves to spin Todorov’s basic, dual options in new and unforeseen directions. It’s almost another entire layer of hesitation: between symptom and source, between psychic manifestation and physical reality, between (you guessed it) reality and fantasy, dream-life and waking-life …

The Exorcism is a dissatisfying but curious horror entry that emerges from the historic swamp of so many hesitations. I am rarely compelled to label a project ‘underdeveloped’, but that’s how this one feels – or perhaps it was, more simply, derailed and simplified as production and post-production went along, as reports strongly indicate. Could there be a director’s cut – another increasingly popular way of realigning the terms of textual hesitation! – in the pipeline? We’ll see.

It's an intriguing brew of elements at the outset – and from a very intriguing guy, Joshua John Miller, unforgettable on-screen ‘queer kid’ of the 1980s (Near Dark, River’s Edge), who has since carved an intermittent trail (with his partner M.A. Fortin) through independent and somewhat more mainstream projects ranging from The Final Girls (2015) to the enthralling and highly De Palmaesque narcotraficante TV series Queen of the South (2016-2021). And even before all that, he entered the world as the son of writer Jason Miller – key actor in the film series kicked off by Friedkin’s initial The Exorcist (1973).

Which happens to be the initial high-concept-hook of The Exorcism: a key cast member in a lightly disguised remake of The Exorcist dies in mysterious circumstances, and Anthony Miller (Russell Crowe) – Miller! – is called in as replacement, much to the anxiety of his reasonably estranged teenage daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins). (Reality-check note: in ’73, Joshua John was still a year away from being born … but we get the connection.)

Miller Snr. happens to be an Abel Ferrara-style mess – addictions, blackouts, hallucinations, you name it – and, when his body starts extending its limbs and bouncing around the place, it would also seem he is demonically possessed. (If so, Satan sure is a master of mise en scène: all his entrances and exits are announced in dramatic manipulation of the on-set movie lights.) So, it’s hesitation time: is Daddy just mentally sick, or is he truly suffering bodily expropriation?

Various other layers – few of them worked out all the way to the end – further complicate this premise. There’s the neat gender switch: as (the real) Miller has made clear, instead of conforming to the ‘male authority figure saves a tormented girl’ set-up, here it’s a tormented male adult saved (sort of) by his queer daughter and her black girlfriend, Blake (singer Chloe Bailey – playing the possessed figure in the film-within The Exorcism).

Alas, there seemingly has to be another male intermediary – another priest, no less (David Hyde Pierce as Fr Conor) – to channel the final spirit-exchange fireworks. But it is enjoyable to see Crowe in churchly garb again and playing it so straight so soon after the far less elevated The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) – itself an Exorcist revisitation via the real-man-made-myth figure of Fr Gabriele Amorth, about whom Friedkin made his curious, scrappy, latter-day, almost-believing documentary The Devil and Father Amorth (2017). Wheels within wheels!

There’s a trauma plot, centred in Anthony: dark references (juiced by the sadistic on-set director played by Adam Goldberg – like Pierce, another quasi-comic type) and obscure flashbacks to his sexual violation at the hands of clergy. This is the least developed thread of the film – yet I suspect it was the central thematic motivation in Miller’s & Fortin’s minds.

There’s the reflexive game, lightly reminiscent of the jazzy ‘trapped inside a movie genre’ dispositif of The Final Girls: the initial gruesome murder kicking off the story happens not in what we first assumed to be a suitably haunted house, but the simulacrum of such: a movie set. Which zips us instantly back to a true modern classic of horrific reflexivity, Sidney Furie’s The Entity (1982, which has so far resisted the ever-announced fate of being remade) – a film which, lest we forget, was among the first to really delve into the trauma-complex as a way of sorting out (and deliberately confusing) its generic hesitations.

When The Exorcism ultimately lands, Bug-like, on a reprise view of its Ladies’ Man-style cut-away set, what is it saying, exactly? Hard to know, or to tell – at least in the mangled or compromised form that the film has reached us. But it’s a curiosity worth checking out amidst an intriguing run of religion-flavoured horror films in 2024: Immaculate, Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen …

© Adrian Martin 21 July 2024