Starring: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Louis Herthum and Iris Bahr
Distributor: Hopscotch Films
Runtime: 87 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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So much storytelling is fact told as fiction. With reality TV and the post Blair Witch Project genre, so many films are really fiction told as fact. The same here. While it does have one eye on The Exorcist and its story of demonic possession of a girl, the other eye is on the hand-held camera techniques that could make the initially unwary (but much less so now) believe that what they are seeing actually happened just as it is there on the screen.Acknowledging the popular success of such terror films as Cloverfield, The Diary of the Living Dead and the Rec/Quarantine series as well as the alleged authenticity of the Paranormal Activity films, The Last Exorcist purports to give us interviews with the reverend Cotton Marcus, with his wife and son. It them makes us complicit with Marcus and his producer and cameraman as we visit a farm where Marcus will go through the ritual of an exorcism, get his fee and go on his way proving that ,possession’ is only a state of mind, heighted and/or hysterical and that God and the devil seem to have very little really to do with it. A one-time child prodigy of a preacher and with his first exorcism at ten (and his picture and the story proudly in the paper), he is a credit to his hyper-evangelical congregation-rouser of a pastor and a dab hand at raising alleluias himself.
But, with the birth of his deaf son, he has lost faith in what he is doing and just keeps going for the money to support his family.
So, (with the actor playing Marcus presenting a nice clean-cut image – we first see him shaving – a mixture of Michael Douglas and Robert Redford), the film is set to debunk possession, exorcisms and religion.
And he does it, with a few props to help things along and a few winks to the producer. He feels sorry for the 16 year old who seems to have been slaughtering cattle overnight and slashing her brother. He finds himself back at the farm where ‘legion’ seems to have come back to occupy the cleansed soul and body of the girl.
It gets quite complicated as he invokes the help of the local Lutheran pastor and his chubby assistant who is delighted she is in a movie. The father of the house has his problems when he discovers – you might have guessed it – that his daughter is pregnant. Plenty of suspicions as to the father, but…
Just when you might be suspecting that this is a case of real possession, the film-makers overdose on Rosemary’s Baby and give us a rather hurried ending which is big on shock but not on credibility, certainly as to how the film got rescued, edited and marketed at all. But, of course, that is not the point.
While there are references and biblical quotes, observations on Vatican exorcists and their increasing numbers, on how possession and exorcism are common to all denominations and religions, this is a religious film only in name. It does, of course, raise many questions about God and the devil, about faith and prayer, about superstition and credulity. But, the ending reminds us that this is just a movie concoction rather than, as it alleges to show, the real thing.
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