Director/co-writer Joshua John Miller has family history with horror. As a child actor, he was the kid vampire in Near Dark. Also, he’s the son of playwright-turned-actor Jason Miller, who played Father Karras in The Exorcist — the obvious model for the film-within-a-film being remade in The Exorcism. With star Russell Crowe riffing on well-publicised real-life difficulties, this is plainly a more personal (and unofficial) Exorcist add-on than, say, last year’s The Exorcist: Believer.
Though it has that low-light gloom of many recent horror films, The Exorcism is as much behind-the-scenes showbiz drama as shocker. Director Peter (Adam Goldberg) — such a snake you suspect the screenwriters have someone in mind — tries to get a performance out of washed-up Anthony Miller (Crowe) the way demons in possession movies try to destroy priests, spitting out wounding, vicious comments designed to scar the psyche.
Russell Crowe is more tragic than terrifying.
Much of the action takes place on the studio floor where a multi-storey house without a fourth wall represents the demon-blighted home in the story. A key confrontation is imaginatively staged in ‘the cold room’, a replica bedroom set created in a chilled separate studio so actors’ breaths show on film (The Exorcist used one of these).
Sam Worthington is cast as a second exorcist, glinting with ambition when the possibility of his role becoming the lead is raised; Chloe Bailey has a great moment on set when Anthony is close to meltdown and she tries to comfort him even though she’s in full, alarming Regan-type possessee makeup. David Hyde Pierce, meanwhile, is creepy as the priest working on set as technical advisor, unfortunately a living reminder of the abuse Anthony suffered as an altar boy (perhaps piling on the agony too much). Crowe comes straight from The Pope’s Exorcist, a jollier entry in the cycle — and digs deeper, though he’s more tragic than terrifying.
