Flasz On Film

“Guys, hear me out. I have an idea.” He leans forward, grabs a mug of hot chamomile tea and holds it in front of his chest in both hands, like a precious little jewel, serenely infusing the surroundings with a steamy aroma of ultra-processed herbs. The vegan leather sofa makes a subtle farting noise when he adjusts his posture, anticipating an inspired announcement of what has been brewing in the back of his mind for years now. 

“You know how all demonic possession movies are always about young kids possessed by the devil?” His eyes wander from left to right, seeking nods of approval. “It’s boring.” 

He pauses for effect.  

“Imagine, instead of a ten-year-old girl—how boring is that—we get an absolute unit of a man. We get Russell Fucking Crowe and we get him to do a spider walk on set. Wouldn’t that be cool? And we can make this whole thing a bit of a meta experience, like Scream, where it will be a movie about making a movie like The Exorcist, but it’s the actor who plays Father Karras who gets jumped by Beelzebub. He’s already big and scary and he could probably toss all these final girl-types around like ragdolls but give him the power of Satan and he’ll be like The Incredible Hulk on crack.” 

He takes a sip of his tea, emits an audible sigh and puts the mug down. He’s all alone in his apartment. He opens the lid of his laptop, logs in and begins to type.  

This is more or less how I imagine the ideation process that jumpstarted the process of The Exorcism coming together as a movie. Now, I don’t know what happened in real life, but then again, I am not here to disseminate the news or recount th events like a homegrown film historian. I’m here to make stuff up and tell you why I don’t think it’s a wise idea to dip into your wallet and spend your hard-earned dinero on a ticket to see The Exorcism.  

However, before I get there, I might as well give you all the reasons why it could theoretically be a good idea to do the exact opposite and venture out to see it. First of all, as hinted at in the opening paragraph of my lousy fiction, you don’t get too many chances to see a possession horror where the character taken over by a malevolent spirit is a massive oak of a man, let alone one who’s both a bona fide acclaimed star and a bit of a meme these days. You almost always imagine it would be a movie about a girl in a stained night gown walking on the ceiling and hurling obscenities at the screen, hoping to upset the viewer because such foul language is incongruent with a visage of an otherwise innocent young female protagonist.  

What you may also be keen to acknowledge is the meta element of the narrative where the movie takes place on and around a film set where a group of inspired individuals attempt to produce a possession horror. And the possession horror in question, together with its many externalities, is built to resemble nostalgically some aspects of how at least a handful of other well-known horror movies came together. Which includes William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Therefore, if you are so inclined, you will perhaps notice how the director of the film (played by Adam Goldberg) will stop at nothing to get his actors into a state the characters require—at their wits’ end—which is probably what you’d expect Friedkin would have done, had he been tasked with the job of putting this movie together. After all, he would fire a gun behind people’s backs to get them into a sufficiently frazzled state, or he infamously orchestrated for Ellen Burstyn to be hurled against the furniture despite the fact he knew it was a dangerous thing to do.  

Introduce a cold room set and a bunch of characters who are visibly aware of these meta elements. Did I mention this movie was produced by Kevin Williamson—the man behind the 90s Slasher Revival—himself? I think you get the picture.  

However, as I mentioned on a few occasions, familiarity alone is not enough to furnish a satisfying cinematic experience, which is exactly why The Exorcism falls apart at the seams like a cheap suit. And I think this is because the filmmakers themselves were either too consumed with the central gimmick of getting an absolute unit of a main character in the form of Russell Crowe— the belly, the jovial smile, the works—that they forgot to write an effective story around him. Instead, they must have reverted to the same Large Language Model that was used to make turds like Cobweb, Sting and Imaginary, which I affectionately and with my tongue only slightly pressed into my cheek refer to as WanGPT. They fed it a new data set comprising of 90s Scream-like slasher movies together with a detailed exploration of The Exorcist and let the AI fill in the blanks.  

Consequently, The Exorcism is adequately braindead in virtually all aspects not relating directly to the idea of getting Russell Crowe to do a spider walk, lurk in the shadows with a doll-like expression or speak through a voice modulator, most likely applied during one of several ADR sessions required for this movie to come together. In fact, it probably wouldn’t take a genius to go through the story beat by beat, denude its own narrative shortcomings and point out cheap tricks (like non-diegetic jump scares, flickering lightbulbs and the like), just to drive home the simple and indubitable point that very little in this movie makes even a scintilla of sense.  

But hey-ho, if seeing Russell Crowe getting to be Father Karras doing a spider walk with Sadako-like facial expressions will get you through the day, then The Exorcism has got you covered. You will also experience some elements of elevated horror as the entire narrative rests on the idea that Crowe’s character is a recovering addict suffering from unresolved childhood trauma; trauma he had allowed to spill over his own family life, and which led to his daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins). This is adequately explored only using artistic half-measures reliant mostly on flashbacks to visually tame insinuations of child abuse at the hands of a priest coupled together with a handful of dream sequences, just to round out the picture. But you’ve seen it all before, handled more gracefully and delivered with considerable punch. I can only imagine what Ari Aster would have done with an idea like that. Alas.  

I think I rambled for long enough, thanks. What I am trying to say is that The Exorcism isn’t worth your time. For all its pop cultural tethering, meta-identity and pervasive self-awareness, the movie just isn’t effective. It is nothing but a concoction of tropes and visual ideas an AI algorithm could have iterated having been pre-trained on sufficiently relevant dataset of horror movies. Thus, the only valid reason to watch this is to see Russell Crowe fold upon himself, walk around like a dangerously overweight demon and occasionally have a genuinely intriguing moment with Adam Goldberg, who I can only believe was directed to pretend he’s a Friedkin-like maverick. But this novelty wears out its welcome much faster than you’d expect and by the time the final sequence set in the Chekhov’s cold room comes around to elicit some kind of an emotional response, it is too late because your enthusiasm will have long been in the car, driving home. At that point you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated at the fact Joshua John Miller (the writer-director who in real life is the son of Jason Miller, who played Father Karras in The Exorcist, by the way) swindled you out of your pocket money to show you Russell Crowe doing a spider walk in a movie that could have been more successfully written by WanGPT.