99 min | PG-13 | April 2, 2021 | Screen Gems
A washed-up reporter digs up a fake miracle in a small New England town and a mute girl starts hearing the Virgin Mary. The Church smells salvation. The movie smells like every possession picture you have already seen.
Gerry Fenn is a disgraced journalist chasing tabloid fakery in a small Massachusetts town. He breaks an old porcelain doll buried under a tree and a mute girl named Alice starts speaking, hearing, and healing the sick. The town calls it a miracle from the Virgin Mary. The film wants to be about faith curdling into spectacle and the Church monetizing a girl’s suffering. It never commits to that idea because it is too busy hitting the marks of every possession movie that came before it.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Fenn as a man coasting on cynicism until belief becomes useful to his comeback. Morgan gives the part a worn-out charm that the script keeps undercutting with exposition. Cricket Brown plays Alice as a vessel rather than a person, switching between beatific and menacing on cue. Cary Elwes plays Bishop Gyles with a wandering accent and a hunger for the publicity the miracle generates. William Sadler plays Father Hagan as the lone skeptic who knows what is buried, and Sadler does more with a few worried glances than the leads manage in entire scenes.
Evan Spiliotopoulos directs his own screenplay, adapted from the James Herbert novel “Shrine,” and stages the scares as a metronome. The camera glides toward a face, the score by Joseph Bishara swells, and a digital figure lunges with a sound-design jolt. Every fright arrives on the same schedule and announces itself before it lands. The CGI apparition dissolves into smoke and embers whenever the budget runs thin, which drains the threat of any weight. The production design leans on candlelit churches and fog without finding a single image that lodges in the memory.
The film mistakes religious iconography for atmosphere and jump scares for tension. It raises a real question about whether the miracle serves God or the institution that profits from it, then drops the question to chase another fake-out in the dark. Morgan is too good for the material and knows it. The result is a horror movie that goes through the motions and forgets to be frightening.