Summary
Russell Crowe is back fighting the devil but this time he isn’t riding a little vespa, a shame indeed.
I like that Russell Crowe is trying to move into horror and I hope he does it more, the genre suits him. When I first saw a poster for this film I thought it was a sequel to his Vespa riding adventure from either last year or the year before, sadly it isn’t.
The idea of an actor in a possession film becoming possessed is a fairly novel idea, at least on paper, I can’t say I have seen it before and I have seen a lot of possession films. However, it is in execution that this film falls apart, in three key ways.
Firstly it has a very prominent child abuse sub plot and for me personally this was a bit needlessly unpleasant, it made me feel uncomfortable every time and whilst I can understand from a character motivation point of view why they included it to explain Crowe’s characters negative feelings I feel it went on for a bit too long. Moreover, I question haven’t we had enough horror films that reference the abuse of the Catholic Church, what happened was pure evil but do we still need to be fixating on it when so many other films have already covered it?
Secondly, the film makes Crowe a deadbeat dad to give him the twin issues of the possession and his substance abuse, from a character point of view you can see why they did it. However, what it leads to is a very annoying bratty teen/young adult character, Ryan Simpkins, who you just don’t care about. This teen character is the main character of the film she is the one being targeted by the possessed Crowe you are supposed to like her and yet you don’t. Chloe Bailey should have been the lead with it telling two stories of two actors in this film and how the possession effects the film rather than doing the father daughter thing.
Thirdly, this film in terms of horror just repeats the same beats over and over again, none of it is new, nothing is something you haven’t seen before. It takes what could have been a good idea and then just wastes it by filling it with junk.
Overall, this film is below average possession fare, there is much better out there.
1.5/5
Pros.
Crowe is trying his best
It is a good premise
Cons.
The child abuse stuff is too full on
It is the same old same old
The daughter is irritating and hard to warm towards
It has pacing issues
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