Director – Joshua John Miller, Screenplay – M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller, Producers – Bill Block, Ben Fast & Kevin Williamson, Photography – Simon Duggan, Music – Daniel Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes, LLC (Supervisors – Nico Del Giudice, Brad Kalinoski & Doug Stewart), Special Effects Supervisor – Will Purcell, Makeup Effects Design – Adrien Morot, Production Design – Michael T. Perry. Production Company – Outerbanks Entertainment/Miramax.
Cast
Russell Crowe (Anthony Miller), Ryan Simpkins (Lee Miller), Chloe Bailey (Blake Holloway), David Hyde Pierce (Father Conor), Adam Goldberg (Peter), Sam Worthington (Joe), Adrian Pasdar (Tom)
Plot
Actor Anthony Miller is rehearsing to play the lead role of the priest in a remake of The Exorcist. He is recovering following a public fall from grace due to alcoholism and neglect of his wife as she was dying of cancer. At the same time, his sixteen year-old daughter Lee has been kicked out of college and returns home to stay with him where they re-establish their relationship in Anthony’s newfound sobriety. As production on the film gets underway, Anthony struggles to get into the role of the priest. Doing so stirs uncomfortable memories from the past for him and draws him back to the bottle. At the same time, he becomes taken over by a demonic force.
The Exorcist (1973) was a huge hit when it came out and has been an enormously influential genre classic. It created the Possession and Exorcism genres – clichés that don’t seem to go away of the possessed mouthing taunts and obscenities amid a barrage of head-turning effects and of Catholic priests as the frontline defenders chanting the rites of exorcism to drive the demon out. There have been a string of sequels and innumerable copies, which are still repeating the same clichés five decades on. 2023 was the fiftieth anniversary of The Exorcist and saw it celebrated in a number of ways. Blumhouse reunited several of the surviving principals to make the sequel The Exorcist: Believer (2023), which was a massive disappointment for all concerned. Far more inventive was The Exorcism.
Bear with me as I explain The Exorcism. I actually had to draw a diagram for my viewing companion to follow. The Exorcist starred actor/playwright Jason Miller (1939-2001) in the role of Father Damien Karras, the Catholic priest who had lost his faith. Miller himself convinced director William Friedkin to let him take the role because he had a grounding in Catholicism and had attended Catholic college. Miller enjoyed success as a result. He went on to three marriages and had several children, one of whom was Joshua John Miller (one of his other children incidentally is actor Jason Patric), Joshua John had his own career as a child actor from the age of eight. Jason Miller also had alcoholism issues throughout his life – indeed, these were cited as the reason he only made brief appearances in the sequel The Exorcist III (1990) and the rest of his scenes were played by Brad Dourif.
Come the present, Miller’s son Joshua John now makes a film about an actor struggling with alcohol issues and a Catholic past who is cast in central role of the priest in a remake of The Exorcist. The connection is made direct by Russell Crowe’s actor being given the name Anthony Miller – Jason Miller’s birth name was John Anthony Miller. Joshua John also writes himself into the script in the form of Ryan Simpkins’ daughter – like Joshua John, she is also gay and at one point appears to be on the receiving end of her father’s violent, drunken (albeit possessed) abuse about it.
Russell Crowe as Anthony Miller, the actor playing a priest in a remake of The Exorcist, who becomes possessed
There are other interesting associations that wind in and out of connection to The Exorcist. The role of the equivalent of Jason Miller is played by Russell Crowe who had just come from playing a real-life exorcist in The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), a film that sidestepped basic facts for a rehash of The Exorcist. (Although Crowe gives a much more finely shaded performance here than the one he did as Father Amorth). Crowe is also an actor who has had his own high-profile brushes with alcoholism. In addition, the film is produced by Kevin Williamson, the writer of Scream (1996). Williamson is apparently a huge fan of The Exorcist and includes a parody/homage in his directorial outing Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), plus an episode deconstructing it in his tv series Glory Days (2002).
I had a great liking of Joshua John Miller as a child actor. He gave memorable performances in River’s Edge (1986) and Near Dark (1987), as well as appears in other works like Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), Teen Witch (1989), Life on the Edge/Meet the Hollowheads (1989), Class of 1999 (1990) and And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird (1991). In more recent years, Joshua John has embarked on a career as a writer, having delivered the script for the witty slasher homage The Final Girls (2015), as well as created the crime tv series Queen of the South (2016-21) and written a book about his own battles with addiction with The Mao Game (1998).
These autobiographical elements make The Exorcism a much more interesting homage to The Exorcist than Exorcist: Believer ended up being. The Exorcism makes much reference to The Exorcist from a close reconstruction of the set of the house and Linda Blair’s bedroom to a visit to the cold room – the set built for The Exorcist that reduced the temperature to something like -20o so the actors could have misted breath. The opening scene gives us the arrival at the house as a narrated run through of the shooting script. There is the constant playing with expectations that one has of the original. I particularly liked the scene where Russell Crowe’s priest is struggling to perform the exorcism and starts becoming ill while Chloe Bailey is writhing and doing the whole possessed thing on the bed and switches between taunts of “cocksucker” and “fuck you” to express concern about him.
Ryan Simpkins as Russell Crowe’s daughter and girlfriend Chloe Bailey (who also plays the possessed girl in The Exorcist remake)
The Exorcism works better when it is a purely mundane autobiographical work about an actor’s descent into a troubling role and his daughter’s reaction on the sideline. On the other hand, The Exorcism also feels an obligation to have to be a horror film and adds a second half to that where Russell Crowe’s actor becomes possessed. This is justified by raising the issue of the so-called ‘curse’ that has supposedly haunted some horror movies – a line about “All kinds of messed-up shit happened when they were making devil movies like The Omen (1976), The Exorcist and Poltergeist (1982).”
After this point, The Exorcism heads in more traditional possession and exorcism movie directions. It also heads in different directions than The Exorcist did, before ending on a climactic exorcism scene. In The Exorcist, the central figure was the priest who had lost his faith (Jason Miller) come into the home to deliver an adolescent Linda Blair as she was possessed by a demon. Here the point-of-view character is more Ryan Simpkins’ daughter who is struggling to prevent her father (the actor playing the priest) from being swallowed up by his demons, which are triggered when Adam Goldberg’s director probes into Crowe’s past to get him to find what he needs for the role, causing him to spiral back into alcoholism and then possession. It is clearly the side of the film that is of interest to Joshua John Miller, the part he most identifies with – the teenager trying to stop their father the actor being swallowed up by alcoholism and the symbolic fight to exorcise the father’s demon. By contrast, the priest here (David Hyde Pierce) is a much more ineffectual character on the sideline.
The genre almost obliges The Exorcism to have to culminate on an exorcism scene, but this is actually the least convincing part of the film. By assorted contrivations, the film has the principal characters assembled at the film’s set (a replication of the original The Exorcist house) and entering Regan’s bedroom. Here priest David Hyde Pierce challenges the demon to enter him, just like Jason Miller’s Father Karras did at the climax of The Exorcist. Joshua John then contrives a scene where they are taunted by the possessed Hyde Pierce and Russell Crowe gathers himself together to drive the demon out. This is a climax that rather absurdly has Russell Crowe, joined by Ryan Simpkins and Chloe Bailey, all three notedly being lay persons and the latter two non-believers, be the ones who enact the rite of exorcism. This appears to merely involve them merely calling on the names of the saints. It’s the absurdity of an exorcism performed by an actor playing a priest who succeeds in doing so by overcoming his own troubles and in effect method acting the role of a priest.
(Nominee for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor (Russell Crowe) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
