Cinema Club #12 (October, 2023)

We will be your emotional support buddy throughout this exorcism.

Veronica’s October Recommendations

EMOTIONAL CLAUSTROPHOBIA

Less about being trapped in a physical space, these films are instead centered upon the sensation of suffocating within a mindset or energy. A collection of films that never visually or energetically allow you to quite catch the solid, big breath you’re searching for.

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ANNE AT 13,000 FEET (2019)

Shot in a squirm-worthy collection of handheld close-ups that make you wish you could just take a step or two back to recenter, Kazik Radwanski’s second feature film follows schoolteacher Anne (Deragh Campbell). Anne is overwhelmed by work, dating, and it seems at her more emotionally dysregulated moments, the very process of living. When she discovers skydiving, Anne fixates on becoming fully certified and able to jump on her own—either chasing a sense of catharsis or maybe just trying to fully embrace her spiritual freefall.

SHE DIES TOMORROW (2020)

Considering She Dies Tomorrow’s release date and topic—a 2020 film following the spread of a sense of ennui and dread so severe that it’s both contagious and terminal—it’s unsurprising this movie gained a certain cult following at the height of the pandemic lockdown. She Dies Tomorrow is a movie of internal dread externalized; most effectively executed through its careful and evocative cinematography and sharp, sudden performance turns from rationally skeptical to inexplicably emotionally distraught.

THE ASSISTANT (2019)

Jane (Julia Gardner) works brutal hours at a prominent film producer’s office in hopes of eventually making it somewhere bigger and better in the industry. She tries her best to ignore the sneaking suspicion that her employer is abusing his power with the pretty young actresses whose rides and hotels Jane is always organizing. But on this particularly long and drab day, Jane feels her whole world closing in as her gut feeling trumps her desire to turn a blind eye, and the long-held, patriarchal structure around her refuses to give in or hear out her concerns.

SOFT & QUIET (2022)

Easily the most brutal of this month’s picks, Soft & Quiet follows a group of white supremacist women banking on their femininity allowing them to exist cruelly under the radar. When an invasive prank takes a violent turn, the women in the group are suddenly enacting harm that surprises themselves (though this sense of surprise seems like part of their “innocent white women” performance). Appallingly long shots and ultra-natural performances on the parts of both the hysterical torturers and their brutalized victims give a real-time energy to the film that is both engrossing and horrific.

LAPS (2017)

One of Charlotte Wells’ early short films, Laps is an elevated but realistic representation of a quiet assault on a crowded subway car. Perhaps the most physically claustrophobic of the grouping, Laps is a quick and sharp barb, a holding of breath that rapidly and precisely presents the fight, flight, or freeze response of both bystander and victim.

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Alisha’s October Recommendations

EXORCISMS

I don’t think that swanky special effects and an onslaught of jump scares make for a good exorcism film. I think any good exorcism film will always be more about people — the human condition and what it looks like, ideas of good and evil, whether we have free will, the constitutions of hope and faith — than it will be a marathon of bodies bending in unnatural ways. This, of course, is not to say that creative stunt work and special effects have no place in an exorcism movie; rather, a good one will have both ideology and visual excitement in equal measure. Think of the action-packed though deeply philosophical delight that is Constantine, for example.

Think, also, of William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist, which stunningly delineated what an exorcism movie could be. With the exorcism, that beguiling visual feast, confined to the film’s latter half, much of the film is concerned with ideas of faith in the face of science, with science emerging as the baffled loser; as the other characters’ trials and tribulations rage on, what the film builds is an unbearable amount of tension as it creepingly dawns on us the inexplicableness of the horrors besetting young Regan (Linda Blair). I think the film’s greatest horror is its positing of a force that we, with all our science and advancements, will never be able to explain, least of all quell.

In my books, any good exorcism film will leave me with more questions than answers; it will leave me feeling uneasy with my understanding of the world. With a quasi-follow-up to Friedken’s masterpiece slated to be released this month, let’s consider a few exorcism films that unnerve ideologically and visually.

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THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (2005)

More a courtroom procedural than a straightforward horror flick, The Exorcism of Emily Rose follows the case of a priest (Tom Wilkinson) accused of negligent homicide after Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter), on whom he performed an exorcism, passes away. Laura Linney plays the lawyer defending the priest. This film will crawl under your skin for Carpenter’s jaw-dropping performance, but also for the purity of the faith carried by Wilkinson’s priest. There’s an obstinate belief in the good in this film that is mightily respectable, and in this sense, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is deeply hopeful. Whether you check it out for a good scare or to remind you of goodness, you won’t be disappointed.

THE EXORCIST III (1990)

William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, both the book and then the screenplay for Friedkin’s adaptation, writes and directs The Exorcist III, which picks things up about 20 years after the end of The Exorcist. George C. Scott plays Lieutenant Kinderman, the detective who investigated the murder in the first Exorcist, and Ed Flanders plays Father Dyer, Damien Karras’ dear friend. Kinderman and Father Dyer have become close friends who bond over films and their mutual love for the late Father Karras. After a series of murders following a long-dead serial killer’s modus operandi, Kinderman is led to a psychiatric ward where events from the past threaten to unravel his and Father Dyer’s hard-won present. This film contains one of Brad Dourif’s career-best performances, and is unmissable simply for this. But it also contains such compelling examinations of evil, its harrowingly mundane ubiquity, and Blatty surveys it with such dauntless dexterity and in such viscerally and visually terrifying ways, that this film could easily be counted as being better than the original Exorcist. Blatty ups the ante in ways previously unimagined by lacing throughout the unflinching, basest evil, a kind of love so pure and simple as to rectify lost hope; that Blatty defiles this love throughout the film is his genius, why his is one of horror’s greatest minds. The Exorcist III is a triumph that leaves you feeling as though you have caught the evil it portrays like the inescapable virus that Blatty depicts it as.

THE MEDIUM (2021)

The Medium is perhaps the most frightening film I have seen in recent years. It’s about a kind of shamanism that is passed down through the women in a family — when a woman is chosen to become the next shaman, it is said that a Goddess possesses her, working through the woman to help others. When the current shaman’s niece begins showing signs of possession, it is believed that she is next in line for shamanism, that the Goddess is manifesting through the young woman. But things go terrifying off kilter and it soon becomes evident that the young girl is possessed by some dark force. This film is creepy, and be warned, a dog does meet a terrible end in it. Nonetheless, The Medium is unforgettable for me for the ways in which it explores the idea of godlessness and despair in the face of unbridled and indiscriminate evil. As the current shaman, who is meant to channel the Goddess, works to exorcize her niece, she finds herself again and again faced with divine silence. Meanwhile, evil lurks and rampages all around her. How can a good god allow all this badness, this film asks. And what is truly electrifying about The Medium is that I don’t think it has an answer, because who on earth does?

THE DEVIL AND FATHER AMORTH (2017)

This is a documentary directed by William Friedkin following the famed exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, Father Amorth. Friedkin is allowed to observe with his camera as Father Amorth performs an exorcism, and this exorcism, in most of its entirety, is contained within this documentary. The Devil and Father Amorth isn’t just a straightforward presentation of the exorcism, though — Friedkin’s is far too curious a mind for such a linear presentation. Bookending interviews with William Peter Blatty, with Father Amorth, and his exorcism work, are various interviews that Friedkin conducts with everyone from priests to neurologists to psychologists. Friedkin is such a confident and earnest interviewer, prodding and following up with his subjects with gusto and genuine interest. The effect of Friedkin’s questioning and curiosity is that this documentary emerges as a fairly balanced survey of the phenomenon of possession, considering the topic with respect from various angles — both religious and scientific — and striving to present not so much a definitive answer as to whether exorcisms work or are necessitated, but rather to present exorcisms as events that some people feel they direly need, in the way they need religion. Friedkin emerges from his investigation with a greater understanding of the limits to human knowledge, and therefore with a greater realm of possibilities, which I think is perhaps the best way to conclude an interrogation of exorcisms.