118 min | R | November 12, 2021 | Netflix
Six men who survived sexual abuse by Catholic priests pick up cameras and rebuild the rooms where it happened. Robert Greene turns drama therapy into filmmaking and lets the survivors call the shots. The result is the rare documentary that hands the victims the director’s chair and means it.
Six men in Kansas City share the same wound. Each survived sexual abuse by Catholic clergy as a boy. Robert Greene gathers them with a drama therapist and hands them the tools of filmmaking. Together they write and stage short fictional scenes drawn from their own memories. The film is not about the abuse itself. It is about what it takes to walk back into the rooms where it happened and own them.
Ed Gavagan speaks with the controlled fury of a man who has rehearsed his anger for decades. Mike Foreman returns to a lakeside property and walks the ground with a stillness that reads as barely contained. Joe Eldred and Michael Sandridge approach their scenes with visible reluctance and then commit completely. Dan Laurine works the camera for the others, which lets him face the material from behind the lens. Ryan Trobough, a young actor, stands in for all of them as boys, and his presence forces the men to confront the children they were. Monica Phinney guides the drama therapy without steering it toward easy catharsis.
Robert Greene directs and writes, and his method is the film’s argument. He refuses to separate the staged recreations from the documentary footage of the men building sets and blocking shots. The edit cuts between the fiction and the making of it until the two become a single act of repair. Greene shoots the constructed spaces, the churches and rectories and lake houses where the men were boys, as both stage sets and crime scenes. The camera holds close on faces and lets long silences run rather than cutting away from discomfort. The structure gives each man his own chapter and his own scene to direct, which hands the authorship back to the people who were robbed of it.
Procession is hard to watch and impossible to dismiss. It documents grown men using the apparatus of cinema to do what therapy and lawsuits and the Church never let them do. They build the rooms. They write the scenes. They decide where the camera goes and when to call cut. The film understands that control is the thing the abuse stole, and it gives the men a way to take it back on screen.