Who doesn’t love a good ol’ exorcism movie? There have been plenty of them over the years (The Exorcist, The Taking of Deborah Logan, Belzebuth, The Conjuring), and while many of them are fairly awful, it’s always interesting to see how filmmakers find innovative ways to keep our attention and play with our expectations of the subgenre.
Shudder’s The Cleansing Hour, directed by Damien LaVeck, manages to breathe new life into the exorcism subgenre. While it plays with many familiar themes (the hypocrisy of organized religion, faith versus doubt, demonic mind games), The Cleansing Hour is anything but a familiar experience.
The movie introduces us to Father Max (Ryan Guzman), an exorcist with a man bun and a cult following from his live streaming exorcisms, which, he assures his viewers, are sanctioned by the Vatican. With the help of his lifelong friend Drew (Kyle Gallner), Father Max has cultivated a road to riches and fame by performing these staged exorcisms, and despite being a wholly unlikeable douchebag, he’s even managed to pull in some naïve groupies. But Father Max and his team have attracted the attention of an actual demon, and when their latest actress becomes possessed during a live streaming event, audiences across the world will watch as Father Max plays a high-stakes game for the lives and souls of his friends.
In lesser hands, this movie would’ve been an absolute flop. The story and demonic lore are all over the place, and I can see an inexperienced storyteller failing miserably at making this movie work at all. But LaVeck takes the story just seriously enough that we feel free to laugh during the funny moments, jump during the scary moments, and become invested in the characters despite their personal flaws. It certainly helps that the movie is shot well, and due consideration was put into things like lighting, pacing, and the slow revealing of important information.
I have to give a shout out specifically to Alix Angelis. She plays Lane, Drew’s fiancé and last-minute replacement for an actress meant to play the possessed victim during Father Max’s latest live stream. Although would-be actors might think it’s easy to play a character possessed by a demon, I’ve seen enough bad exorcism movies to know that it can go horribly wrong when the role is miscast. Angelis really knocks it out of the park, making smooth and distinct transitions between her possessed character and the demon who’s speaking through her.
The makeup and CGI are also outstanding, and this is another thing that could’ve ruined the rest of the movie if it had been given too much or too little focus. There’s only one CGI-heavy scene that seemed out of place (albeit very expensive and well-done), but it was brief enough that I didn’t really mind. Angelis’s “possession” makeup rivals that of Reagan in The Exorcist, and it made her aforementioned performance even more unnerving in all the right ways.
My only real problem with The Cleansing Hour involves the twist. I’m not the type of reviewer to spoil things, so I’ll just say the ending involves the “live streaming” concept, and it takes the stakes from something personal between a small cast of characters all the way to something global…and then it just ends. The story does seem to be building toward this particular twist, so I can’t say it was tacked on or undeserved. However, it just didn’t work for me. I would’ve been satisfied if the twist was removed entirely, since I cared vastly more about Father Max and his friends than I did about outside characters who were given little to no development.
So grab your Vatican-approved holy cloth and pray for absolution—demons are apparently exposing self-obsessed internet icons and their flock of undesirables.
7/10
Throughout the month of October, I’ll be reviewing 31 movies I’ve never seen before. Is there an excellent movie you think I haven’t seen? Tell me in the comments below, and I’ll check it out!
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