A Filmmaker's Review: The Rite (2011)

Shoddy writing and empty performances by everyone except for Sir Anthony Hopkins meant that this film was pretty much a failure from the very beginning. With a main character who cannot seem to hold the storyline together nor is sure of himself, the audience fails to put their faith in him and therefore, it makes it very difficult to see the storyline as something that he can have an impact on.

When it comes to the script, I really can't believe that some people sat around a table and thought "there really isn't anything wrong here." I mean, some of the lines were just so incredibly cheesy it was very hard to take them seriously. Also, even with the lines that were meant to be a bit more philosophical and deep, Colin O'Donoghue could not seem to perform them correctly. I don't think that he was right for the main role at all, he couldn't really live up to Toby Jones or Sir Anthony Hopkins and so, his appearance in the film was shallow and pretty much meaningless until he was involved in the final exorcism. This is something that you have to spend almost one and a half hours waiting for and so, when it does come around you have already lost interest in the character.

When it comes to the cinematography, it tries to copy a lot of other movies such as "The Da Vinci Code"(2006) with its images of the Vatican and Rome and the dark, violinist music ominously playing in the background. I'm not sure but I don't think it was correct for a horror film to have so much ominous uses of classical music. Normally, in a horror film, you need moments of complete silence and this film did not have nearly enough of them. It is far too reliant on the atmosphere to get across the darkness of the characters involved in the exorcism and is way too reliant on other people in order to articulate the confusion of the main character.

Some of the scenes in the film were down right cheesy as well. For example: the night before Michael is meant to leave for priesthood college, he is drinking with his friend and the conversation sounds so very rehearsed, it could have been taken out of any American High School. Another scene is the one where Michael is blessing the woman as she dies on the floor and the whole thing is very matter-of-fact and he is just seen regaining his knowledge at that moment after failing the theology examination and signing his resignation from the school.

However, Sir Anthony Hopkins was really holding together the whole film with his dark and unsettling performance and so both of the 2 marks this film gets are for him. He portrays the priest who finally gets attacked by the demon who once was disbelieved by Michael to be in the pregnant woman. It is an incredible performance which really gets under you skin and I don't know why but even the lines that were shoddily written for Sir Anthony Hopkins were well-performed by him. I think though that the film needed a stronger actor than Colin O'Donoghue to portray the main character because if we look at other priests in peril in other films we have Tom Wilkinson in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" and Jason Miller in "The Exorcist" and so, Colin O'Donoghue cannot really live up to either and cannot really compete at all.

All in all, the film is a strange attempt at depicting horror as an on-set of strange events that copy both “The Exorcist” and this modern horror trope of the film being too dark to see at various points. The leading man was absolutely awful and pretty hollow in his performance with Sir Anthony Hopkins trying to save the movie from falling flat again and again. To be honest, this film would have been a lot better with some stronger actors. Especially the women in the film. The women were all shallow and cut from every female horror trope ever. I would have expected more but the point is that this film is probably worth the watch because of how it shows us not to make a horror movie for the 21st century.