Director – Oliver Park, Screenplay – Hank Hoffman, Story – Hank Hoffman & Jonathan Yunger, Producers – Jeffrey Greenstein, Hank Hoffman, Yariv Lerner, Sam Schulte, Les Weldon & Jonathan Yunger, Photography – Lorenzo Senatore, Music – Christopher Young, Visual Effects Supervisor – Vesselina Hary Georgieva, Visual Effects – Alps VFX (Supervisors – Alessio Bertotti & Filippo Robino), Worldwide FX & Worldwide FX UK (Supervisors – Ran Manolov & Milen Piskuliyski), Special Effects Supervisor – Ivo Jivkov, Creature Effects Supervisor – Kate Walshe, Production Design – Philip Murphy. Production Company – Millennium Media.
Cast
Nick Blood (Arthur Feinberg), Emily Wiseman (Claire), Paul Kaye (Heimish Feinberg), Allan Corduner (Saul Feinberg), Daniel Ben-Zenou (Chayim), Anton Trendafilov (Yosille Fishbein). Meglena Karalambova (Aida Fishnebein), Sofia Weldon (Sarah Scheindal)
Plot
Arthur Feinberg returns home to visit his estranged father Saul, accompanied by his pregnant wife Claire. His father and brother Heimish are Orthodox Jewish followers and together run a Jewish funeral home, although Arthur has parted with their ways some years earlier. Arthur and Claire are welcomed in but what Arthur has not told the others is that he has come there to convince his father to put up the funeral home up as collateral to prevent Arthur’s own house from being foreclosed. At the same time, the body of elderly Yosille Fishbein is delivered to the funeral home. Arthur is asked to prepare the body but unwittingly removes an amulet. The amulet is imprisoning a demon that Yosille ritually took into his body. Now unleashed, the demon begins playing with the reality of those around.
The Offering was the first feature film directed by Oliver Park who had previously made a segment of the anthology A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio (2019). The film is produced by Millennium Media/Pictures, a company formed by several former Cannon Films associates. Millennium have a habit of buying up the rights to previously successful properties and spinning off further sequels, remakes or reboots as with the likes of The Wicker Man (2006), Rambo (2008), The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (2009), Conan the Barbarian (2011), The Mechanic (2011), Texas Chainsaw (2013), Leatherface (2017), Hellboy (2019) and Rambo: Last Blood (2019), among others.
The Offering gained some good notices when it came out. It set in the world of Orthodox Judaism. This of course brings undeniable associations to Keith Thomas’s The Vigil (2019). Both The Vigil and The Offering are set around orthodox Jewish funerary rituals and feature a protagonist who has lapsed from the faith being drawn back in to deal with a demonic force that has attached itself to the recently deceased where it proceeds to play a series of games of Reality and Illusion.
The film comes with a particularly good opening where we see Nick Blood and pregnant wife Emily Wiseman returning home to be warmly greeted by his father (Allan Corduner) before this abruptly cuts to Nick on the phone pleading with creditors that he can get his father to sign over his home as collateral. This sets up an intriguing series of conflicting undercurrents that play throughout.
Yosille Fishbein (Anton Trendafilov) accepts the demon into his body
Oliver Park delivers a fine series of jumps and slams. My issue complaint would be that many of these are driven by amplified noises on the soundtrack. These amplified jumps come in contrast to the dialogue which is often quiet and soft-spoken, such that I was constantly having to adjust the sound volume as I was watching in order to hear what was being said and then turn it down again when the action heats up so as not annoy the neighbours.
Oliver Park creates great tension and a singular mood. There’s an extraordinary scene during the wake where Emily Wiseman pulls off a sheet covering a big mirror that reflects the festivities going on before she turns around and see that the real party behind her consists of people frozen in place. There is a particularly unnerving appearance from a widow (Meglena Karalambova) during the later scenes, before the film builds to an undeniably effective climax. There is also a great-looking appearance from a goat demon.
