The Exorcism (2024)

JULY 1, 2024

GENRE: POSSESSION, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

By my count, Joshua John Miller has written two films about growing up with a parent who is famous for a horror movie. One is The Final Girls, which is sweet and fun and taps into nostalgia for the era of slasher films, and the other is The Exorcism, which is... well, none of those things. Miller is the son of Jason Miller, star of The Exorcist, so one could kind of see Final Girls as the writer dipping his toes into autobiographical waters before diving in without a lifevest in the deep end this time around, as he not only directed this time as well, but also tackled his reality head on: it's about the child of an actor playing the priest in a possession movie.

Russell Crowe is the toplined star, playing disgraced actor Tony Miller, but the real protagonist is Lee (Ryan Simpkins) as his daughter, who is sent to live with him after being kicked out of her boarding school for the rest of the semester. Their relationship is not great—she calls him "Tony" instead of "Dad"—but she helps him practice lines for what is apparently his first good gig in along time: the Max Von Sydow role in a remake of The Exorcist. He gets her a gig as a PA (to ensure she's around for the film's events), but almost as soon as filming begins he starts acting strangely. Is he possessed, like the character in the film he's making? Or is he letting his own demons (with addiction, with his wife's death, with a repressed childhood, take your pick) get the better of him?

It's a solid idea for a movie, and one can't argue with the quality of the cast they've assembled to tell it (how often do we see David Hyde Pierce show up in a genre film?). But unfortunately, the movie feels incomplete from start to finish, as if Miller and his cowriter M.A. Fortin had some great ideas for scenes and began filming them before knowing how those scenes would end, or flow into the next. Sequences start and seem to be going somewhere, only to stop abruptly without being mentioned again. Certain co-stars show up for such minimal screentime that one wonders why they bothered to cast them (even Sam Worthington; he's third billed but I would be shocked if his screentime topped as many minutes, playing what is essentially Jason Miller's role in their possession movie). Even major plot points—such as the aforementioned PA gig—aren't even made clear with a line of dialogue or something, we just have to infer it after seeing Lee on set a half dozen times before a scene where she brings the director a coffee.

Worse, there's a phoniness to it all that is constantly distracting. They never come right out and say they're remaking The Exorcist; Lee looks at her dad's script and says "Wait, so they're remaking... (chuckle)", which along with the film's title ("The Georgetown Project") and what we pick up on of the film's plot through a few scenes of the actors filming it (two priests, possessed girl, head spinning) makes it very obvious what movie they're remaking without ever actually saying so. Later they even bring up The Exorcist, but as one of a few examples (Omen and Poltergeist being the others) of cursed productions, but even though it's already been stated that they're doing a remake of ("chuckle"), the reference dies there, without anyone noting the coincidence. All of this makes the movie feel insincere, like you're watching an Asylum mockbuster of a would-be exaggerated biopic.

Then again, it seems that the original idea was to just straight up set itself on the set of the original 1973 film, and after that didn't work out (I'm guessing the rights holders politely declined) they opted to say it was a remake in the present day and then never really fleshed out how that would change things, so a lot of the would-be trappings of a period piece remain. Lee, being a teenager in 2019-2024 (this sat on the shelf for a while; Crowe shot it before Pope's Exorcist) has a cell phone, but the one time she uses it is in one of the film's many confusing scenes (she is scrolling instagram when it starts buzzing as if she got a new message or something, but she begins panicking as if something was wrong, but we never see her phone again to understand why she's so upset). At one point she even grabs a landline (a corded one at that!) to try to dial for help. And the director of the film (Adam Goldberg) is so Friedkin codified (throwing his weight around the set, screaming at actors, saying horrible things to them just before calling "Action!" in order to get a rise out of them to improve their performance) it almost seems like no one told Goldberg he wasn't supposed to be playing the legendary auteur. They even have a cold room set, as if this was a necessary part of the production instead of just something Friedkin did because he didn't have CGI to add the actors' breath to sell the idea of the room being cold.

The whole "is he possessed or mentally ill?" angle makes no sense either. At one point Tony jumps out a window and returns to set the next day, and he also does a full backwards contortion (i.e. spider-walk) type in front of the entire crew. However these things are chalked up to "he's drunk/he's off his meds"? And while the actor Tony is replacing (played by Adrian Pasdar! Always nice to see that dude) dies from what appears to be a freak accident, the movie takes a brief trip into slasher territory by having Crowe straight up murder one of the other actors by smashing through his dressing room mirror, an act that causes the movie to be shut down but prompts no other investigation or suspicion. Where's the Lt. Kinderman standin when you need him? Even sillier is that his daughter sees all these things from the start and yet keeps showing up to work. What are those morning car rides like?

I am really baffled by this endeavor. Again, it's been on the shelf for a while, and I spied an "Additional Editor" in the end credits which tends to mean it was reshaped from an earlier attempt (ironically this makes it closer to a true Exorcist movie than anything else, as nearly every one of them has alternate versions). There are reports that Covid messed with post production, so I can only assume that they planned to do reshoots after the late 2019 filming and never got to do so, and re-edited the movie to make something more or less coherent out of it. And that sucks for the filmmakers, but if they're still charging the same price for a ticket, then the movie has to be judged on the same level as all of those "actually completed" ones showing on the adjacent screens. And this movie is nothing more than some scattered ideas in search of a pulse. Next time write a book, Mr. Miller - you can get away with more, clearances wise.

What say you?

Tweet