Director: Michael Peterson
Year: 2025
Country: Canada
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Exorcism
Plot:
After a failed exorcism, a priest returns to his hometown to reflect on his position only to find his thought-dead father returned to him setting off a chain of events that point to a special entity running through the town and must rely on his spirituality and faith to save everyone he holds dear.
Review:
This was an overall decent if decidedly generic feature. Among the more enjoyable factors present here is the wholly intriguing setup that admittedly tries to do something clever and unique with the possession genre. Rather than go for the traditional route of a conflicted priest brought back to the side of righteousness due to a prolonged battle with a demonic entity that tries testing him in the body of a young girl, this one goes for more a small town corrupted by an evil entity and forcing him to deal with it. The backstory involving the cult’s activities taking over the area only to be stopped by the authorities starting his quest with the church and using that as a basis for spreading the malicious activity in the present by allowing it to come off with the mindset of the figures coming back for revenge.
That sets up some of the more intriguing, if ultimately problematic, work here, where the attempts to save the town manage to bring about some underwhelming work involving the attempts at exorcizing the demonic spirits within the victims. In concept, this work should be quite intriguing as it soon becomes obvious that there might not be demonic forces holding the spirit hostage but actually holy figures that are involved for different reasons than would initially be suspected. However, the film never goes through with this idea, as the idea is brought up early as the reasoning behind the father’s return, yet it never does anything interesting with the idea other than doing something different for an exorcism scene beyond throwing dollops of holy water at a contorting woman yelling in demon-accented Latin. The visuals in the scenes look intriguing enough with the spectral lights and stuff going on, but it’s more about how different these are than anything else.
By the time it gets to the finale and the actual purpose of the exorcism is brought into play, this one ends up falling apart rather badly. The rushed nature and generally unprepared story make a big impression on this part of the film as the few bits given to the background of the main characters are generally uninteresting and not even pertinent to what’s going on as there’s a bizarre abduction and holding hostage aspect that doesn't make much sense why the figure in particular would be involved. That renders a lot of the race to save feel redundant and lacking in tension as there’s no real stakes here with no information on what’s going on, from the background of the characters to the purpose of the cult and what they’re working towards with everything just given a surface-level gloss that never goes deeper into these aspects. The supernatural action and explosions are fun enough, but they’re not nearly enough to save this one.
Overview: **/5
An intriguing if mishandled exorcism effort, there’s enough here to be likable for what it is while still being immensely let down by some big flaws into being a massive missed opportunity. Those who are fans of this particular style or are curious about it will have the most to like here while most others out there should heed caution for other genre fare first.
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