When you critique film for an archdiocesan magazine, exorcism movies are something of an occupational hazard. They simply come with the territory, like splinters for lumberjacks or involuntary celibacy for aspiring screenwriters.
“The Ritual,” in theaters June 6, will be my third in as many years (with several others left unreviewed out of editorial exhaustion). Fortunately if you miss one of them, you can simply see any other to catch up. Perhaps the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he had more than one trick.
But “The Ritual” has an ace up its sleeve and a higher pedigree than others in its genre, in that it has snagged the great Al Pacino to play its exorcist. The filmmakers have taken a lesson from “The Pope’s Exorcist,” which had similar success with Russell Crowe. Sometimes the most prudent option is to mortgage your house to pay a good actor, hand him a crucifix, and clear the floor to let him work.
“The Ritual” is based on a true story of Emma Schmidt (played by Abigail Cowen), whose exorcism was the most heavily documented in American history, to the point of a near-contemporaneous write-up in Time magazine. Set in 1926, the film gets to neatly sidestep any accusations of pillaging from the 1973 classic “The Exorcist,” since the real-life case already had “an old priest and a young priest,” as Dr. Evil in “Austin Powers” so concisely put it.
The film follows Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens), a young parish priest in Earling, Iowa, tasked by his bishop to oversee Schmidt’s exorcism, which involves picking the location, taking notes, and generally getting out of the way while the real expert, Capuchin friar Father Theophilus Riesinger (Al Pacino) handles the tricky stuff.
Steiger chooses a convent on the outskirts of town for some privacy, with the nuns assisting the proceedings. Patricia Heaton plays the Mother Superior exactly right: not angelic, not severe, but with the exasperation of a foisted-upon middle manager. Everything is beyond your pay grade when you take a vow of poverty.
Steiger isn’t a skeptic, but he does see exorcism as the absolute last resort after a battery of medical and psychological examinations. Riesinger is a true professional; he’s not one of those celebrity exorcists holding press conferences and seeing demons peeking out behind every Harry Potter book. He agrees entirely that most cases brought to the Church can be solved medically, but that’s precisely the issue: he deferred to Emma’s doctors a decade prior, and now she’s back and scampering across the ceiling.
Ceiling scampering currently exceeds the scope of modern science.
For the next 90 minutes, the film is torn between some nifty ideas and appeasing the peanut gallery that keeps these movies so consistently profitable. Schmidt claims to be possessed not by a devil but by Judas Iscariot himself, and in one gnarly instance lifts a nun by her hair. But at the same time, there are also bed frames that bend, obscenities that are shrieked, skin that hisses when touched with holy items, and other things that are vomited. Luckily for the distributors, most possessors lack the divine spark of creativity, so even these real-life cases mostly play the hits.
The actors don’t seem to mind playing the hits either, as the setlist schedules in plenty of time for some solos. The head exorcist is always a juicy part, gravitas invariably mixed with some slight irreverence to the chaos around him — and Pacino has a good time with it, though it helps that he operates at such heightened camp as a baseline.
Actors also love the secondary priest role. If the old priest is the true believer, the young priest clutches a rosary in his dark night of the soul while still giving furtive (and chaste) glances to a nun wearing eyeliner. Stevens, a battle-tested heartthrob veteran of “Downton Abbey,” gives a seminar in those forlorn little side looks here.
Likewise, playing the possessed girl gives young actresses a chance to demonstrate their range. Here “range” usually involves things like the ability to contort your body in slightly more demonic iterations of yoga: frothing, rolling back your eyes, doing that London Bridge thing with your back — all of it’s pretty tried and tested.
I also realized on this watch that I have yet to see an exorcism movie that does not have a young woman wearing a long flowing white nightgown. I don’t doubt that young men are also possessed by demons, yet I also understand why their stories aren’t told: our pajamas aren’t nearly as aesthetically pleasing. It’s not as cinematic to see your oldest pair of basketball shorts flap and flutter across the ceiling.
Why is this genre so consistently popular? For one, Catholicism seems to be hip with the kids at the moment. It helps that the recent conclave (and more importantly, the movie “Conclave”) has kept our faith in the public imagination lately. But these movies’ popularity also precedes this brief overlap with the vogue, to times when the institutional Church’s PR was slightly less than stellar.
Perhaps what I mistake for derivative storytelling is precisely the appeal; the public doesn’t want novel approaches to exorcism, what it needs is constant reassurance that there is a tried and true method of banishment, with frequent examples for further illustration. Every addition to the genre is but another reminder that, rare in this anarchic existence, there are procedures in place. So of course these movies are formulaic: there’s safety in a formula.
