de facto film reviews 1.5 stars

For modern moviegoers, most blockbuster supernatural horror feels familiar; a family arrives at a house, wherein spooky things suddenly go bump in the night, and one or more of them inadvertently falls prey to the entity’s evil influence. Incredibly, 2023 sees Academy Award winner Russell Crowe appear in one such film, The Pope’s Exorcist, his first “true” horror role (2017’s The Mummy be damned). Despite its experienced lead actor and borrowings from the memoirs of real exorcist Gabriele Amorth, which are likely chockful of exciting but terrifying recountings of his supposed dealings with the forces of Hell, Julius Avery’s newest project fails to introduce any new life to a tired horror subgenre.

In The Pope’s Exorcist, Crowe portrays Amorth, a rebellious and passionate clergyman who serves as – you guessed it – the pope’s chief exorcist tasked with investigating apparent acts of demonic possession. Set during the ’80s, an American family’s young boy becomes possessed by a powerful demon and specifically calls upon Father Amorth after the latter’s controversial incident with a mentally disturbed man. The ensuing battle pits Amorth’s faith against the Devil’s trickery and malice while trying to save the boy and his family. Such an age-old rivalry could be a compelling conflict rife with opportunities for terror and meaningful theological discourse. Instead, The Pope’s Exorcist is an ultra-generic exorcism picture carried by the strength of its cast and production design.
Crowe, as expected, is the life of the film, charming and witty in the intervals between demon-centric scenes, then assertive and captivating when facing the Devil. Daniel Zovatto, playing Amorth’s trusty sidekick, Father Esquibel, does an admirable job in Crowe’s shadow. Other key members of the Vatican include veteran actors Franco Nero as The Pope and Cornell S. John as Bishop Lumumba, who play their roles dutifully. The European locations, including the primary setting of a run-down abbey (willed to the movie’s central family by their recently deceased patriarch), are magnificent and add extraordinary life to otherwise mundane scenes of priests talking about the sins of the Catholic Church and temperamental family dynamics.

Aside from the few positives, The Pope’s Exorcist features far too much of Hollywood’s exhaustive horror tropes and other poor decisions to sit alongside superior demonic flicks, particularly The Exorcist, arguably its most significant influence. As alluded to before, the plot is redundant when considering Friedkin’s masterpiece and other possession films beyond it, seeing the grizzled old exorcist interacting with the compulsory but offensively trite and forgettable nuclear family (or some version of it); the movie’s intrigue comes in the form of a creepy underground chamber, likely the source of the estate’s evil. Unfortunately, the script’s unwavering sameness even manages to lose the family’s storyline, making it all feel rather pointless.
The film’s worst offense, however, is the horror itself. There is little escalation to its most tense moments due to some frenetic pacing—a desire to get straight to the point, meaning a shockingly low level of suspense. To top it all off, the possessed boy, Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), is outrageously miscast. Although he puts his best foot forward, his performance as the Devil is more corny than disturbing, made worse by the character’s cringe-inducing dialogue. And for an R-rated horror film with an $18 million budget, Avery and the studio could have opted for riskier and more graphic gore rather than the safe, samey content they did include.

Regardless, The Pope’s Exorcist includes enough humor and fun demon-fueled action to appeal to a more casual theatrical crowd that isn’t expecting much else. On the other hand, the ravenous horror faithful and genre vets will find much of the same masquerading behind a bigger budget and an A-list star whose excellent performance isn’t nearly enough to exorcise the evils of Hollywood’s dullness