Yet his character changes rather rapidly from a self-obsessed, hard-drinking wreck into a man who cares deeply about others. Morgan is terrific at this kind of thing, grizzled and sturdy but with an undeniable warmth.
But once the story is underway and the mysteries are revealed, the mood is undone. There's whispered dialogue about the ancient mechanisms of good and evil and God and the devil. The Unholy is set in a small town where faith plays a key role, which means old churches and plenty of statues and candles, stained-glass windows, and other symbols - and even a creaky church basement and a musty old book.
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theaters April 2.This atmospheric horror movie starts off well, with plenty of intriguing imagery and history, but it eventually drifts into autopilot, falling back on routine scares, lazy dialogue, and shortcuts. Opening-night viewers of “The Unholy” will be likely to have forgotten it by Easter. The distributor is playing up the fact that this film is hitting theaters on Good Friday, but that seems like a decision based more on exploitation than on provocation. There’s not a lot of local flavor on display, and the low budget shows when Alice’s miracles don’t attract a throng of hopefuls waiting to be cured. What we get instead here is a tepid little chiller with an overqualified cast, which also includes Katie Aselton as the local doctor.
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Sam Raimi is a producer here, and it’s hard not to think about how he might have mined this material both for provocation and for fright his “Drag Me to Hell” remains the gold standard of how to scare the heck out of an audience within the restrictions of PG-13. (Lil Nas X covers these issues, with more depth and artistic fervor, in 190 seconds in his “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” video.) But you can also sense the filmmaker holding back and trying not to offend even the craven bishop is balanced out by young Monsignor Delgarde (Diogo Morgado, “Son of God”), the savior-in-a-collar required in any movie about demonic possession.Īlso Read: 36 Possession Movies And Counting: Why Hollywood Is Taken With the Unholy Phenomenon Spiliotopolous’ screenplay (based on the novel “Shine” by James Herbert) pays lip service to the idea that miracles can bring as much bad as good into the world, and that it’s hard to distinguish the hand of God from the trickery of the devil. That no one bothers to ask which Mary leads everyone into typical scary-movie trouble, from the people that Alice heals (including her emphysema-suffering uncle) to the diocese’s unscrupulous bishop (Cary Elwes, with an erratic clam-chowdah accent), who sees dollar signs at the prospect of this small Massachusetts town becoming the next Lourdes.
Alice miraculously begins speaking and hearing, bringing a message that she has been visited by the spirit of Mary. His careless act unleashes the spirit, which possesses Alice (first-timer Cricket Brown), the deaf and mute niece of Father Hagan (William Sadler), whose church is adjacent to the tree. Watch Video: 'The Unholy' Trailer Offers Sinister Horror Take on Faith-Based Films (Yes, this is another movie where witch-burners are portrayed as correct and virtuous rather than the fanatical misogynists that history has shown them to be.) The woman’s spirit is captured in the body of a doll that is left at the bottom of the tree so that disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) can find it in the modern day and crush it in order to instigate a phony story he’s writing about cattle mutilations for a dodgy website. She’s accused of being possessed, then nailed to a tree and set on fire. The film’s opening sequence, set in 19th-century Massachusetts, offers a woman’s POV. On top of that, it’s a PG-13 horror movie, which takes excessive gore off the table, pushing the director (in this case, screenwriting-vet-turned-debut-director Evan Spiliotopolous) to replace it with lukewarm jump scares. You’ve seen this one before, countless times, with its superhero priests and seemingly omnipotent spirits who are somehow powerless against containment prayers and quick-thinking investigative journalists. There’s the germ of a provocative idea in “The Unholy” - namely, what if you took a religious-visitation movie like “The Song of Bernadette” or “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” and turned it into a horror movie? Had the film bothered, or dared, to pursue that notion to the fullest, “The Unholy” might be something other than the standard-issue, priests-versus-demonic-spirits thriller that it is.
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