91 min | R | February 10, 2023 | IFC Films
A woman travels to a remote convent on the Scottish coast to learn how her priest brother died. The nuns insist it was suicide. The film insists on a dozen explanations and commits to none.
Grace travels to a remote convent on the Scottish coast after her brother, a priest, dies in an apparent murder-suicide. She does not accept the official account. The nuns guard their grounds and their secrets, and the local police seem content to close the case. Christopher Smith builds the film as a grief story wearing the costume of a possession thriller. The real subject is a woman who refuses to believe what everyone insists she should accept. The film keeps promising that her refusal means something and then loses faith in its own premise.
Jena Malone plays Grace with a clenched, watchful stillness. She treats every nun as a suspect and every kind word as a trap. Malone commits to a character who is half detective and half mourner, and she carries scenes that the script abandons. Danny Huston plays Father Romero with a smooth menace that never resolves into a real threat. Janet Suzman plays the Mother Superior with brittle authority and the suggestion of an institution protecting itself. Thoren Ferguson plays DCI Harris as a skeptic who exists mostly to ask Grace the questions the audience is already asking.
Christopher Smith directs from a script he wrote with Laurie Cook, and the two cannot decide what kind of film they are making. The cinematography turns the Scottish cliffs into a wall of gray stone and gray water, and the convent feels cut off from rescue. The editing keeps cutting to a medieval backstory and to fragments of Grace’s childhood, and these inserts arrive faster than they earn meaning. The score leans on stingers to manufacture dread that the staging does not supply. The production design dresses the convent in candles and crucifixes without finding a single image that lingers. Smith made sharper genre films before this, and the craft here feels assembled rather than discovered.
Consecration wants to be a thriller about faith, a horror film about grief, and a mystery about a corrupt church, and it never picks one. Each thread starts with a hook and ends with a shrug. The final act stacks twist on twist until the story collapses under its own machinery. Grace deserves a film that trusts her doubt instead of drowning it in mythology. Malone gives this material more than it returns. The convent keeps its secrets, and none of them are worth the trip.