I suspect that the vast majority of the people turning out this weekend to see the new Russell Crowe vehicle The Exorcism will be under the assumption that it is a quickly-made follow-up to The Pope’s Exorcist, the goofball horror film that he did that became a moderate box-office hit when it was released last year. In fact, not only does it have absolutely no connection with that earlier project, it was actually made back in 2019, put on a shelf when the arrival of COVID made reshoots an impossibility and only recently reworked and completed, presumably to cash in on the success of The Pope’s Exorcist. If all of that has you head spinning like. . .well, like the character played by Linda Blair in the groundbreaking horror classic The Exorcist, keep reading because you haven’t heard anything yet.
Here, Crowe plays Anthony Miller, an actor who is struggling to reestablish a career that went way off the rails when he abandoned his dying wife and their daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), to overindulge in booze, drugs and other forms of bad behavior. Miraculously, he seems to get that shot when he is cast in the role of the priest in a film titled The Georgetown Project that, for all intents and purposes, appears to be nothing less than a remake of The Exorcist itself. Needless to say, Miller, with his tattered reputation, was not the first choice for the part but when the original actor dies in a gruesome accident while rehearsing on the set, the film’s monomaniacal director (Adam Goldberg) decides to give him a chance, hoping to utilize MIller’s considerable real-life issues to bring extra verisimilitude to the role.
With Lee having returned home after being suspended from boarding school—for reasons that will become abundantly clear once she meets Blake (Chloe Bailey), the actress playing the role of the possessed victim in the film—Miller gets her hired on as a PA on the set in the hopes of rebuilding their tattered relationship. This takes an early an awkward turn when Miller is mortified to find the director essentially throwing all of his well-publicized sins back into his face as a way of prodding him into delivering a more intense and realistic performance. Before long, Miller is acting strangely—coming across as disoriented and forgetting lines—leading most people to assume that he is back on the drugs and booze.
At first, Lee suspects the same but as things go on and the production is increasingly hampered with mysterious calamities, she begins to sense that something much deeper is happening with him. When she confides to Father Conor (David Hyde Pierce), the priest brought on to the production as a technical consultant, he speculates that the personal and professional pressures being put upon Miller are stirring up old demons. He is on the right track but alas, not even he considers the notion that those demons might be more than merely metaphorical until it is painfully obvious (emphasis on the painful) that Miller has a genuine demon within him that has taken over and which is hellbent on destroying the actor for good.
In other words, not only does The Exorcism trade upon our memories of The Exorcist—which has been the case with practically every film made touching on the subject of demonic possession in its wake—it also takes inspiration from our collective knowledge of the well-documented troubled circumstances of its production and the so-called “curse” surrounding it. And just to add one final layer of meta to the proceedings, consider that the film was directed and co-written by Joshua John Miller, whose father, Jason Miller, famously co-starred in The Exorcist as the haunted Father Karras and—okay, one last layer—whose given name was John Anthony Miller. Even the intrinsically self-referential Scream movies have nothing on this film in the way that it practically deconstructs itself right before your eyes as you watch it.
To be sure, The Exorcism is certainly more ambitious than your typical Exorcist-inspired project—it may well be the most conceptually nervy project along those lines since Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Boorman’s jaw-dropping 1977 sequel to the original that was lambasted upon its initial release but whose audaciousness will one day be fully acknowledged and celebrated—and there are a number of good things about it. Miller’s determination to grapple with the original film’s legacy—especially in terms of how it looms over his own familial history—is certainly intriguing, giving the material an personal edge that can be felt throughout. As the troubled star, Crowe delivers a strong and sturdy performance that finds him touching on memories of his own somewhat checkered past in the public eye (oops, another layer) with the scenes between him and Simpkins, at least in the early going, having a quiet power to them. Those with a working knowledge of the original film will, of course, have a lot of fun with the various homages and references strewn throughout, the most ingenious of which is probably Goldberg’s performance as the director, which anyone who has seen or heard the late William Friedkin, that film’s director, will recognize as a sly and at time weirdly accurate take on the man and his intense nature.
The problem with The Exorcism is that, having established itself over the course of its first two-thirds as both a hall-of-mirrors take on a piece of legendary cinematic lore and a psychological portrait of an actor driven to physical, emotional and mental depths as a way of trying to process his own traumas, the film abandons all the more nuanced aspects of its narrative approach to give us yet another finale centered around an actual exorcism with things blowing around, flames bursting and taunting demons. This is all technically executed in a decent-enough manner, I suppose, but having gone out of its way to find an offbeat approach to the material up to that point, it is more than a little dispiriting to see it conclude in such a familiar way. The schism is so great that, although I have nothing to specifically back this up, I have a feeling that it may have originally concluded in a much different manner and that the aforementioned reshoots were done to bring it more in line with audience expectations. Ironically, in this regard, it ends up having parallels with The Exorcist III, which was originally a more psychologically-driven film that was famously delayed from release until a new ending was devised and shot centered around an out-of-left-field exorcism involving a character played by. . . Jason Miller. (So many layers.)
Because of the inexplicable and largely disappointing plunge into the familiar in its concluding scenes, I cannot quite bring myself to fully recommend The Exorcism. And yet, the whole thing is so odd and off-kilter, at least for its first hour or so, that I cannot entirely dismiss it either. (If nothing else, it is infinitely more interesting than last year’s official and largely disastrous Exorcist reboot.) Those who continue to revere the original Exorcist as a touchstone in the history of horror cinema, to be sure, may well find it to be an intriguing riff on its enduring legacy. If only it had a stronger and truer conclusion, this might have been a real keeper instead of the intermittently fascinating misfire that it ultimately proves to be.