The Exorcism: Cinematic Healing
VerticalElevated horror are two buzzwords that seemingly cause a great deal of harm and distress upon the Horror community. Partly due to the nature of projecting an academic narrative upon the work, which in part pushes away a large mass of people due to not wanting what is essentially straightforward conventions of entertainment to be either politicalised or scrutinised to excess meaning. The issue is that Horror has always been inherently social, political and personal to the creative team. Be it Fritz Lang during Nazi Germany, Blatty’s wrestling with faith in The Exorcist, Peele’s social commentary in Get Out, Barker’s use of homosexuality in Hellraiser, use of the “other” in Whale’s Universal Monster series of films. Horror and social commentary have worked in tandem with each other since its cinematic landscape was developed. But what of the personal exploits in Horror? What of the creator injecting their own life and identity within the conventions of such genre.
In recent times, Peele in recent times comes to light in Get Out with haunting yet spellbinding writing of race in modern America. However, with what social commentary and personal history Peele unravels in his directorial debut, he maximises its potential and engagement in a thrilling and compelling central narrative. Without the latter, the heavy side of ego and self-cantered exploits begin to ever shadow and ultimately drown out the film at hand. All this to take note, it is staggering to see the lack of critical thinking, discourse and analysis surrounding The Exorcism. Granted, on first viewing it comes off the tails of Crowes’ own exorcist bandwagon with the critically panned but commercially well-received The Pope’s Exorcist as well as gargantuan amount of genre convention and cliche from its own material courtesy of its trailer and saturated genre with Immaculate and The First Omen. Look a little deeper – or utilise some effort – and this feature opens itself up to a dark, trauma retrospective and uncovering from director Joshua John Miller, son of famed and troubled The Exorcist star Jason Miller who played Father Damien Karras in Friedkin and Blatty’s genre defining 1973 spectacle.
On the surface, The Exorcism plays very close to maximised genre convention. Troubled person (Crowe) with a history of problems, psychologically and personally, has his life unravel in front of him in a time of difficulty with devastating consequences and an exorcism thrown in for fun. It plays out in the film itself quite close to that simplistic description. However, such simplicity and straightforward design is far from the intended vision from director Joshua John Miller, who essentially puts his own father through the lens of their relationship and examines his trials and tribulations of being an absentee and alcoholic father via Crowe. If it does not become obvious on first viewing the feature the Crowe’s character is working on can very well be seen as Friedkin’s The Exorcist, or at least a poke and jibe connection to it, a project in itself was allegedly troubled and disturbed with Miller having great meta fun at incorporating into his plot with tongue firmly in cheek yet remaining sincere and upfront. The project literally and figuratively consumes Crowe’s characters life and thus relationship with his child with haunting results that consume him through addictions and mental fragility. Crowe’s character is slowly but surely consumed into production with a difficult and all encompassing director (Friedkin) and meat grinder industry. It breaks him down and down from the place of hope and promise, cuts him to pieces and reassembles him into a character on a page and defines him as such, with a supernatural entity taking over and replacing this man into something else entirely.
The spectacle and demand alongside said fragility destroys and destructs Crowe’s Miller to an inevitable climatic consumption. Director Joshua John Miller evokes this through the lens of narrative exorcism of a character being consumed and manipulated by an entity. An elevated depiction of his father losing his way and control of himself through work and ultimately his battle with drink. Retrospectively creating a feature of him leaving a piece of himself each day on a film set(s) never to return, slowly slipping away as the person he saw over a larger period of time crumble which like Crowe’s character finds solace in the bottom of a bottle. It’s a dark and haunting venture from Miller to essentially put forward such personal and private feelings and conflictions of a man he called “dad” and presents it to audiences within this medium opened to criticism and conversation, all the while in the most hauntingly intimate and devilishly meta cinematic approach.
What is the most devastating thing here, however, is just how raw and emotional the whole arrangement is throughout. How writer-director writers what is essentially his own avatar and voice in Ryan Simpkins’ Lee Miller with such venom and emotional complexity against his own and their father on screen (Crowe/Miller) is often times overly devastating to watch through that very lens. With the knowledge of how personal this feature is, it has two to three sequences and set-pieces in which such venom and antagonism is levelled at one another it makes for quite intended gauche viewing. Yet, in this specific directors vision, how could it not? Perhaps it’s a mixture of what Joshua John Miller was able or unable to say to his father, those once open and bright walls of home being a safe space to be a dark, gloomy prison, the connections severing into passive and silent moments, all claustrophobic or more so incites to the larger things that consumed their relationship, director Joshua John Miller does so with unflinching and certain unabashed truths. And yet, so beautifully allows himself to still have a modicum of peace and hope that in the features final few moments his father speaks back to him. Yes, it’s all greatly self-centric but undeniably cathartic and esoteric to analyse his own personal demons through the cinematic lens and while manufactured or not is able to have one last conversation with his own father and allows them both to find peace. The Exorcism is a feature that is not only misunderstood but greatly misread. It is a surprisingly poignant and personally profound experience that while undeniably plays far greater to writerpdirector Joshua John Miller, it still acts as a fun albeit touching sentiment to play with horror genre convention and personal exploits with deeply engaging and immersive results.
