I Watch “Deliver Us from Evil”

for AmSpec. I’ve now read a couple other horror fans’ reviews, and they have the same mix of “There’s clearly something interesting here, yet the execution is off somehow–bland, reliant on cliche, SOMETHING’s not right.” This even though they pick out different and in some cases opposite elements to praise or criticize. My conclusion is that the specific bits of the movie you find powerful or frustrating may vary, but there’s something lacking in it, something a bit paint-by-numbers and surface-level.

Still worth seeing if you are specifically a fan of exorcism horror, I think. But one thing I forgot to mention in this review is that even the demonology is weirdly medicalized: “I checked your symptoms on webMD and the answer is DEMONS,” basically. The exorcist often comes across as a technician–the man who knows the rules, not a man who deals with unknown powers. In theory I could like that approach if it’s a way of trivializing demons, highlighting e.g. their lack of imagination, the ways in which they’re unlike the weird unpredictability of God and the saints. But in this film, to me, it came across as an attempt to cram a supernatural, clawed foot into a scientistic shoe.

(Also, yes, I do know my opening move in this review is unfair.)

In The Brothers Karamazov, after the atheist Ivan has talked for two full chapters—“Rebellion,” the greatest statement of the problem of evil, and “The Grand Inquisitor”—he gives his Christian brother Alyosha a chance to respond. Here we’ve heard the prosecution speak. What’s the case for God?

And Alyosha leans over and kisses him.

Scott Derrickson’s new, sincere horror film Deliver Us From Evil should have listened to how much the wordless Alyosha was saying. Human arguments can only be as big as the arguers. So much of God is left over: outside, eldritch, Other.

Horror should be the genre which best captures this inexpressibility of God, the wrongness of Him compared to the tidy, familiar, practical mental apparatus by which we make sense of the world. The Exorcist is admirably incomplete: tragic, broken, ferocious in the face of evil but submissive in the face of suffering. It convinces by never trying to convince.

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