It’s a brave film maker who tries to make another exorcism movie and a talented one who actually pulls it off as well as here. The legal angle on this one is what really makes it. The results are the same as the classic original The Exorcist, of course – as in that movie, the idea is to study the idea of possession, go down all the avenues and exhaust all the possibilities till only one answer remains, and that answer is … another question.

Laura Linney holds the movie together brilliantly, and Tom Wilkinson is reliable as usual, even if he is kind of playing the same slightly meek American as usual. He just has a dog-collar this time.

There’s more of the actual exorcism involved than I originally expected, and these scenes really succeed. They’re at once what we’ve seen before, beds shaking, wounds appearing, etc, etc, but it’s all done very, painfully realistically and Jennifer Carpenter as Emily sells all this frighteningly well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 at 1:05 am in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.