93 min | PG-13 | October 28, 2022 | Lionsgate
A novice nun trains to become the first female exorcist while a demon she once knew sets its sights on her. The Catholic Church gets a fresh coat of paint and the same haunted patient strapped to the same bed. Faith moves mountains. It cannot move this script.
Sister Ann enters a Boston school where the Church trains priests to perform exorcisms and warehouses the possessed. Women are forbidden from learning the rite. Ann learns it anyway, drawn to a possessed girl named Natalie and convinced that the demon inside her connects to a wound in her own past. The film wants to be a story about a woman claiming authority in an institution built to deny it. It is really a clearinghouse for every possession beat the subgenre has worn smooth, dressed in a nun-as-exorcist hook that the script never develops past the logline.
Jacqueline Byers plays Sister Ann with total conviction and nothing underneath to support it. She commits to the trembling intensity the role demands and cannot generate fear because the script supplies none. Colin Salmon plays Father Quinn as a stern gatekeeper who exists to forbid Ann and then permit her on schedule. Christian Navarro plays Father Dante as a sympathetic ally with no interior life. Virginia Madsen plays Dr. Peters, the institution’s psychiatric voice, and the film raises and abandons her in the same breath. The cast labors over material that gives them poses instead of people.
Daniel Stamm directs from a screenplay by Robert Zappia, and the choices betray a director recycling his own playbook. The contorting bodies, the cracked-throat voices, the cuts to scuttling spider-limbs all arrive on cue and announce themselves before they land. The sound design leans on bass drops and stingers to manufacture the dread the staging refuses to build. The exorcism rooms are lit in the standard sickly green and clinical white, and the camera frames possession as a series of jolts rather than a sustained pressure. Every scare is a delivery mechanism with the suspense engineered out of it.
The nun-as-exorcist premise promises a film about a woman who understands possession from the inside, as trauma rather than spectacle. That film flickers in a single subplot and then surrenders to the machinery of jump scares and exposition. The screenplay treats Ann’s backstory as a twist to be deployed instead of a character to be inhabited. What remains is a pious, airless procession through motions the audience has memorized. The faith is sincere and the fear is fake.