The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

               With a movie like this it’s hard to figure out exactly what the filmmakers were trying to do.  There are at least three distinct kinds of story wrapped around each other here attempting to make it seem like one coherent 100-minute narrative is being told.  A lot of this fractured identity is probably down to good old market-tested four-quadrant appeal, stealing as many of the obvious parts from as many of the currently popular genres as feasible and smashing them together.  What I’m really wondering, though, is whether these disparate parts, by working together, are distracting us from the movie’s real intention: a fairly dark goal of rehabbing the image and history of the Catholic Church.

Way classier a title card than the movie deserves.

              That’s a pretty bold statement to make, so let’s take a step back and look at the people involved here.  It all starts with the script, which in this case was produced by a whole menagerie.  First off, it’s based on the memoirs ‘An Exorcist Tells His Story’ and ‘An Exorcist: More Stories’ by the real-life Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth.  He really was a high-ranking Catholic exorcist from 1986 until he retired in 2000.  As an interesting side-note, the director of ‘The Exorcist,’ William Friedkin, made a not-very-well received 2017 documentary called ‘The Devil and Father Amorth.’  I think we’ll just take it as read that the movie is based more on the idea of his memoirs than anything actually contained within them.

              We have two separate sets of writers, one credited as ‘screen story by’ and the other as ‘screenplay by.’  Way more than the five people listed here worked on this script, the Writer’s Guild arbitration must have been a hoot.  If I had to guess, and I do since I don’t know the answer, I suspect that when the production company Screen Gems bought the rights to the books in 2020 they had a number of up-and-comers take some whacks at an adaptation for cheap.  This included R. Dean McCreary and Chester Hastings, co-writers of a 2019 movie named ‘Fanboy,’ and Jeff Katz, a movie and tv producer who apparently took a shot at writing in 2020.  Enough of their ideas stuck around to be credited in the final product.  The backgrounds of the next two writers, with the fancier ‘screenplay by’ credit, might explain the kind of genre fracturing that makes up this movie.  First we have Michael Petroni, who has an interesting filmography.  He’s bounced between straight drama (‘The Book Thief’), horror (‘Backtrack’), and even another exorcism movie (‘The Rite’).  Sharing credit with him is Evan Spiliotopoulos, who started out writing cheap direct-to-video Disney dreck in the early 2000’s and later graduated to more expensive theatrical Disney dreck with ‘Beauty and the Beast (2017),’ as well as ‘Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins.’  Mind you, Petroni also did ‘The Queen of the Damned,’ so nobody gets to look down on anyone else here.

              Director Julius Avery was apparently not the first person hired for that role, though the small amount of research I was willing to do didn’t turn up who he replaced.  Having made a decent impression with the 2018 World War Two zombie-Nazi movie ‘Overlord’ (notice the hybrid genre), he went on to direct the 2022 Sylvester Stallone superhero movie ‘Samaritan,’ and then this.  It’s an interesting trajectory that mirrors those young directors swallowed up by Disney and Warner Brothers to helm their formula blockbusters, just on a smaller scale.  It also explains the genre mixing, he’d been doing that since ‘Overlord.’  It’s interesting that with the Nazi zombies he kept the tone as serious as he could while in ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ he leaned the other way, nudging all the way up against outright goofiness. 

              The screenplay, shall we say loosely adapted from reality, tells the story of exorcist Father Amorth and a particularly difficult exorcism.  He’s introduced to us while he’s being grilled by the gutless bureaucrats of the Vatican, who question his methods.  He is then sent to Spain by the Pope himself to investigate the possession of a young boy.  The boy, an American, has recently moved with his mom and sister into an abandoned abbey left to them by his late father.  The demon possessing him has specifically requested Father Amorth himself show up.  The Father teams up with a local priest, Father Esquibel, and they learn that it’s such a powerful demon that they need its name to defeat it.  They investigate the abbey and find an underground chamber full of the ancient corpses of members of the Spanish Inquisition.  They discover that centuries ago the demon had possessed an exorcist and thus led the Inquisition in a reign of terror.  The Church eventually sealed the demon in the abbey, but it has now escaped and wants to possess Father Amorth in order to take over the Vatican and thus the world.  After a series of struggles Father Amorth allows the demon to possess him in order to save the boy, then with Father Esquibel’s help and its true name they finally banish the demon once and for all.  It ends with a sequel-hook for more adventures.

              If it sounds like the movie is all over the place, that’s because it is.  Let’s go through the most obvious different kinds of stories included here.  First there’s a priestly variation on a cop movie, where the rogue detective who breaks the rules but gets results has the mayor for a friend and so gets assigned the really difficult cases.  He gets stuck with a partner he’s not sure about, but then they go through some troubles, they save each other’s lives a few times, and in the end they earn each other’s respect.  There’s even a scene at the finale where the partners warmly shake hands and say it’s time to get back to work.

              Next there’s your standard exorcism movie, which doesn’t make up as much of the runtime as you’d think.  We get an ancient abbey whose renovation cracks a seal in the basement, freeing a demon who possesses a young boy.  He does the usual demonic child schtick, talks all low and spooky, vomits things up, hurts himself, contorts himself and runs around all weird, classic stuff.  Eventually a priest frees the boy from the demon by allowing it to posses himself, at which point the boy and his family are bundled into a car and completely exit the movie, never to be seen again.  This exorcism is kind of the entire point of the intellectual property, it’s what Screen Gems bought the rights for so it’s gotta stay in, but it sure can be deemphasized.

              Then there’s the third movie, which is an Indiana Jones-styles action-adventure.  We have a scholar digging into ancient lore and finding ultimate evil.  Our heroes investigate a covered well and find a skull-lined passage to an underground cavern.  They discover long-lost corpses and forbidden texts that warn of ancient horrors.  They’re pursued by an evil foe with supernatural powers but fight back with their own knowledge and skills.  They struggle back and forth with the demon, the fate of the world at stake.  All seems lost when one of them is possessed and begins to fly and the walls begin to glow.  But then his friend rallies and together they seal the hole in reality torn where one of two-hundred angels, cast out after Lucifer’s rebellion, struck the earth.  It ends with ancient tomes in hand, a map to the other one hundred and ninety-nine fallen angels in their possession, and a newly-formed Vatican order set up to support them.  It makes me completely happy that it’s already been confirmed we’re getting the sequel that this ending overtly demands.

              There are shards of other movies in there as well, maybe fragments left over from the who-knows how many other writers who took a swing at it.  There are shadows of what might have been an attempt at a straight drama, as in several scenes Father Amorth ruminates on his guilt about a girl he believes he failed and struggles with being too prideful.  There’s this odd strain of almost nerd humor meta logic, where it establishes that demons can sense your sins and attack you through them, gaining knowledge about you and influence over you through the weakness of a sinful state.  Since confession absolves all sin, if they face the demon freshly-confessed there’s nothing it can grab onto.  This leads to this series of scenes where the two priests take turns confessing to each other.  This small comedy of errors emerges as they negotiate between themselves about what is and isn’t a sin, what is and isn’t actual repentance, with the demon coming in as a chaotic third voice to spin them off again.  There’s also some decent CGI action, I guess.

              What this mish-mash means is that it’s a jumbled mess of conflicting genres and tones that ends up being pretty decent brainless fun, if that’s what you’re after.  It has a bunch of parts tumbled together in the shape of a movie held together by the fact that Russell Crowe is in the middle of it clearly having a blast.  A lot of words have been written recently by people wringing their hands about whatever happened to Russell Crowe, given his ongoing run of mid-budget movies, and I think it’s fairly obvious: he got old and calmed down.  The man has won Oscars, he’s starred in tentpole blockbusters, he’s been a star for thirty years, I think the man just wants to stretch a little and have some fun.  What in the world does he have left to prove?  In this movie he gets to have a ridiculous Italian accent and drive a little moped, he can keep his hands busy with endless little priestly trinkets and wear silly costumes.  This had to have been a lot of fun to make.

              Which is all well and good, but when your movie begins as a couple of very pro-Catholic books detailing an explicit belief in a literal interpretation of demonic evil, you either adapt it while being careful about what you do and don’t imply about morals and ethics or you just flail around with no concern for what you’re saying.  Which is what I believe this movie did.

              When I detailed the people behind this movie, I left out a pretty big group: the production companies.  This is a Sony film put together by TSG Entertainment, so at least we don’t have a flurry of production company artwork at the start.  A lot of smaller movies have to cobble together their budgets from whoever is offering, so the first twenty seconds are often spent watching a series of corporate logos you’ve never seen before, but here there are only two main companies.  The first is 2.0 Entertainment, headed by Doug Belgrad.  They’re involved in a ton of productions like ‘Bad Boys 4 Life,’ ‘Zombieland: Double Tap,’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels (2019).’  An IP machine, this one.  The other company is Loyola Productions, a non-profit set up by and officially connected to the Jesuit order, which explains a lot.  The head of Loyola Productions, Edward Siebert, has the final Executive Producer credit during the title sequence of ‘The Pope’s Exorcist.’

              It’s also rather important to note that Father Amorth was a member of The Society of Saint Paul, an officially recognized clerical congregation dedicated to directly serving the Pope and which was founded to "evangelize with the modern tools of communications".

              I’m generally annoyed by horror movies that try to pretend that the supernatural things they show are in any way based on reality.  The inherent falsity of film is such that even the most accurate portrayal of anything is going to be compromised somehow in order to be more cinematic or simply coherent.  By the simple nature of having a camera record things, elements are inevitably being left out or overemphasized by the visuals.  When it’s werewolves and vampires, whatever.  When it’s something as nebulous as ghosts and poltergeists, eh, annoying but mostly harmless.  Belief in demonic possession, though, is something that actually harms people’s lives.  It’s good that the closest they get to claiming that what’s shown on screen really happened is during the trailer, when it claims the movie was “inspired by the actual files.”  But it would obviously like you to think they’re telling you a true story.

They get a lot of little things wrong, like implying he was an active exorcist until his death in 2016 when he retired in 2000.  There’s a small running joke about Amorth being slightly hurt when it turns out that people haven’t read his books, insisting, “The books are good.”  The first book he ever wrote was his memoir, originally published in 1990.  This movie is set in 1987.  The movie asserts that he was the ‘Chief Exorcist to the Vatican,’ which is an overstatement.  Father Amorth was the founder of The International Association of Exorcists (Associazione internazionale degli esorcisti) but not until 1990, at which time it was made up of six whole priests.  In 1987 he was indeed an exorcist, but simply one assigned to the Diocese of Rome.  This meant that while technically The Pope was his assigned Bishop, that doesn’t mean he was accountable only to him.  Rome’s chief exorcist at the time was Candido Amantini, who did in fact mentor Amorth.

Also The Pope, and that’s the character’s credited name, not John Paul II, is played by Franco Nero, who’s always great to see, but we know who was pope in 1987 and he didn’t have a beard.

              Those things are fine, adaptations are going to adapt.  What troubles me is the way it portrays the operations of the Church and how its depiction of demons and their machinations directly confirms that the Catholic version of Christianity is correct and that the Church is our only hope against the forces of evil.  They collapse the incredible bureaucracy and levels of authority that the Vatican has encircled itself with, built up over the centuries like layers of enamel on a clam, to a single panel of tetchy pencil-pushers who get in Amorth’s way but which can be safely defied because he has the ear of The Pope.  The Pope himself, meanwhile, is only ever seen in a small chapel, constantly praying.  He and Father Amorth discuss The Pope’s intermittent illness, useful for later in the movie when the priests are struggling against the demon and The Pope can dramatically collapse in apparent spiritual sympathy.  They also both sneer at those in the church who would doubt his benevolence or question their actions.  To be clear, the movie hates oversight committees, loves absolute theocratic rulers.

              All throughout their history exorcism movies have been fairly inherently pro-Catholic.  Unless it’s supposed to be ambiguous whether there really is a demon, the existence of the supernatural and the demonstrated ability of Catholic priests to successfully combat it lends credence to a whole mess of Church doctrine.  Better movies like ‘The Exorcist’ play around with this idea, interrogating the implications of demonic possession and portraying the people involved as real, flawed people.  More recent movies like ‘The Conjuring’ series offload a lot of this baggage by making psychics the natural enemies of demons, dropping any kind of coherent theology in favor of jump scares and pat screenplay psychology.

              What’s interesting about ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ is that they do incorporate some nuance into the movie.  Amorth stresses several times that most of the people he sees don’t need exorcisms, they simply need counseling or medication.  The bureaucratic trouble he got in at the beginning of the movie was for pretending too well to perform an exorcism when it was just a show for a troubled teenager.  This is a classic wind-up technique, agreeing with critics on a lot of their points to seem reasonable and then using that supposed reasonableness to double down on the idea that the stuff they’re talking about is different, though.

              But not only are we dealing with a real demon here, we’ve got one who’s been around a while and has a history with the Church itself.  By now everyone is aware that the Spanish Inquisition was bad news.  Most people don’t quite understand how long it went on (technically 355 years) or that it was only one of three major inquisitions (there were also the Roman and Portuguese Inquisitions).  What this movie tries to get away with is saying that the only reason The Spanish Inquisition did so many horrible things is that the head of the Inquisition was possessed by the demon Asmodeus and thus really all the bad stuff was the fault of demons, not the Church.

              The implications this has for the bad things The Church has been accused of more recently logically follow.

              To put it mildly, this is all pretty ballsy.  They keep going, too, saying that the demon was one of the original 200 angels cast out from Heaven, and that it specifically demanded to see Father Amorth because it intends to posses him, return to the Vatican and … take it over?  Not sure if the intent there is to jump into The Pope himself or just influence everyone there.  Either way, the Catholic Church gets a big credibility boost from the demons themselves acknowledging that the Catholic Church is the one true interpretation of our cosmological and spiritual place in the the universal order.  Seems churlish to bring up all of those abuse allegations when they’re fighting to keep us safe from literal demons.

              I don’t mean to overstate, I doubt that most of the people involved in this movie saw it as a story that justified the continued existence and relevancy of The Church, I think they just wanted to make a pulpy adventure story about a fun priest going up against a super demon and kept adding elements they thought were cool.  Nothing about the filmography of the director or any of the writers indicates that they were putting together anything other than high-level schlock.

              Loyola Productions, though, and Ignatius Press, who published Amorth’s books, definitely have an interest in making the movie as pro-Catholic as possible.  I don’t have access to any of the legal details on the rights, or proof that Loyola Productions forced any kind of ideology on the movie.  None of the interviews or articles mention anything like that, nor where there any complaints by those involved, so I’m sure nothing hostile or overt was demanded, but I suspect at the very least there was an agreement to not criticize the Church too awful much.  I wonder if the idea to absolve the Church of the sins of the Inquisition was a screenwriter’s idea or baked into the story from the beginning?  The most I feel comfortable in alleging is that the Church, realizing they had a valuable property in this archive of Amorth’s writings, fished around with it for a few years after his death with some basic stipulations on how it could and could not be adapted and got Screen Gems to bite.  The priest has to be Catholic, the demon has to be powerful, and the Catholic Church has to be the way to fight it.  As long as those factors are kept intact they get the portrayal of the Church they want, and what’s the point of buying the rights to the books of Father Amorth if you don’t want to keep those elements?

              On a more positive note, there are also a ton of delightful little moments that were included that didn’t have to be.  Father Esquibel originally hides a couple of his sins from confession, allowing the demon to cloud his mind, causing their first exorcism attempt to end when Equibel starts strangling the possessed boy.  Didn’t expect to see a grown man trying to murder a little kid, that was fun.  The Vatican bureaucrat who was hassling Amorth the most randomly witnesses Jesus bleeding on a crucifix and dramatically collapses to his knees in a crisis of faith, which was amusing.  There’s a neat little trick where Amorth verifies that the kid is really possessed by waving a Saint Benedict Medal back and forth in front of his eyes until the demon’s pupils become unsynced from the boy’s.  The well lined with skulls is visually interesting.

              Per the wiki the movie made roughly $75 million on a budget of $18 million, and that’s before VOD and blu-ray numbers.  It’s exactly the kind of mid-budget feature that we don’t get enough of, a solid little genre picture that made its money back and more than enough of a profit to justify another one.  My concerns about its theology aside, I really enjoyed this movie.  It’s dumb and schlocky but in a fun way.  It has limited goals but one of them is to just be entertaining, and I think it succeeds.  I like the idea of Russell Crowe entering into his 60’s by embracing his inner character actor.  The movie ends with the idea that Amorth has a new mission, to track down the other 199 fallen angels, and while I don’t know that we’re going to get an even 200 of these I certainly wouldn’t mind another couple, although maybe with less Catholic apologia.