The Pope's Exorcist 🥵

Russell Crowe’s latest film The Pope’s Exorcist opens with a classic line that says the devil is the happiest when you think it doesn’t exist. To make the quote appear little more intense, director Julius Avery uses an eerie background music. It throws a promise to give a thrilling, pulsating experience. It’s anything but. Crowe plays an eccentric, somewhat egoistic, and entertaining exorcist named Father Gabriele Amorth, who possesses a certain amount of swagger in his infectious personality. When we first meet him, he compliments a pig .

Director Julius Avery uses every horror genre cliché and tropes to create an eerie and atmospheric mood, but it all ends up being more cacophonous than chilling.

Cast: Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, and Franco Nero

Director: Julius Avery

That very creature becomes a tool to drive away an evil spirit. And since this is a horror film and he’s a father, an exorcist, what else can be an opening scene. On at least two occasions, he declares he only drives away the devil and the evil, and cures the possessed, not the one who are mentally disturbed or imbalanced. You can see he could have wronged someone in the past, and the narrative uses his words to give us a twist in the tale in the later reels, albeit a very uninteresting one.

What also bogs the film down is its done-to-death story, credited to as many as three writers- Michael Petroni, R. Dean McCreary, and Chester Hastings. A family moves into an abbey (mercifully not a haunted house or mansion) but yes, one member of the family is obviously possessed. Once he begins to convulse, all hell breaks loose and the doctors are unable to treat him too. Enters Crowe, taking the matter into his own hands. (Hello Raaz, Vikram Bhatt, and Ashutosh Rana)! I was expecting the film to pick up pace and get more and more intense from hereon but it continues remaining dull..

There are some brutal shots of suffering but the film is devoid of any jump-scares or frightening moments. Maybe the intent here was to give the audience an immersive experience rather than an intoxicating one. There’s a backstory that ends even before it can begin, and the climax is nothing we haven’t seen in horror films made anywhere in the world. What stays intact is Crowe’s penchant for cracking jokes even when death hangs around and the devil is watching. Guess what, while talking to a demon, he jokes about France winning the World Cup.

The Pope’s Exorcist is a rare breed of horror films that possesses more restless than rousing moments. Too much of chattering and blabbering rob the film of any genuine emotion. At one point, another priest reprimands Amorth for talking too much. Worse, even the demon talks more than doing his freaking job. Not one dead body at sight, only humans flying in the air and bawling till the ear-drums begin to ache. The film remains dull throughout, but Crowe shines, so does the pig he complimented.

It could be argued that the film functions as an endorsement of the questionable career of the real life Father Gabriele Amorth, a man who denounced yoga as Satanic and claimed to have performed over 70,000 exorcisms during his career, mostly on women, who he believed were more vulnerable than men because “the Devil wants to use them to get at men like Eve did to Adam”. If the film wasn’t so hugely ridiculous, the script’s repeated positive references to Amorth’s autobiographical works might leave a sour taste. But ironically for a film that’s sorta, kinda about belief, this papal pulp fiction is too daft to experience with anything other than amused incredulity.