103 min | R | April 14, 2023 | Screen Gems
Russell Crowe straps on a cassock and climbs onto a Vespa to play the Vatican’s chief exorcist, dispatched to a Spanish abbey where a demon has moved into a little boy. He fights the devil with one-liners and a heavy accent. The movie is a paycheck, and Crowe spends it right in front of you.
Father Gabriele Amorth is the Vatican’s chief exorcist. He rides a Vespa through Rome and treats demonic possession as a job with paperwork and skeptics. The Pope sends him to a crumbling abbey in Spain, where a widow named Julia Vasquez has moved her two children into a property she inherited. Her young son Henry now hosts something ancient and furious. The film presents itself as a serious investigation of faith and evil. It is actually a delivery system for Russell Crowe doing an Italian accent and enjoying himself.
Russell Crowe plays Amorth with a twinkle and an accent that comes and goes. He is having more fun than the material deserves, and his pleasure is the only reason to keep watching. Daniel Zovatto plays Father Esquibel, the local priest, as the straight man who exists to ask Amorth the questions the audience needs answered. Alex Essoe plays Julia Vasquez as a mother stretched thin by grief and terror. Peter DeSouza-Feighoney plays the possessed boy Henry through layers of prosthetics, while Ralph Ineson supplies the demon Asmodeus a low growl from somewhere off camera. Franco Nero turns up as the Pope in a handful of scenes that hand Amorth his mission and his deadline.
Julius Avery directs the way studios direct horror now. The camera prowls through stone corridors lit by candle and cold blue moonlight. The demon reveals arrive on cue, telegraphed by the score swelling and the sound design dropping out a beat before the jolt. The script by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos buries a conspiracy plot under the possession, dragging Amorth into a secret history of the Church and the Spanish Inquisition. That subplot exists to inflate a haunted-house story into something with sequel ambitions. The production design does the heavy lifting, building a real sense of place inside the rotting abbey that the screenplay never matches.
The film works in the moments when it lets Crowe be funny and stops straining to be frightening. The exorcism beats are familiar from forty years of films that did them first. The conspiracy machinery clanks loudly and sets up a franchise the story has not earned. Amorth was a real priest who wrote real books, and the film nods at that fact while ignoring everything interesting in it. What remains is a competent piece of holy horror held aloft by one actor who decided to enjoy the assignment. That is enough to pass the time and not enough to remember.