Director Joshua John Miller has a distinctly personal perspective on William Friedkin’s seminal horror classic The Exorcist: his father, Jason Miller, played the reluctant protagonist Father Karras. Yet, seeing his father die on screen in a horror movie isn’t the sole source of inspiration behind The Exorcism, an ambitious, personal piece of meta-horror. Miller and co-writer/partner M.A. Fortin (The Final Girls) channel their rage and experiences with grief into a family psychological drama, one that uses possession horror as connective tissue. However, combining personal family drama with scathing critiques of the Church and Hollywood ultimately means that The Exorcism struggles under the immense weight of its ambition.
Russell Crowe (The Pope’s Exorcist) stars as Anthony Miller, a recovering alcoholic trying to make amends with his estranged daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins, Fear Street Part Two: 1978) in the wake of his wife’s death. Lee, struggling with grief herself, comes to live with Anthony after stirring up trouble at school. When Anthony gets offered a role as a priest in an exorcism horror movie, The Georgetown Project, the job serves as an emblem of hope for the Millers.
Instead, Anthony starts exhibiting peculiar signs that suggest that he’s either slipping back into old habits or that art is imitating life in hellish ways.
Adam Goldberg’s Peter, a sleazy Hollywood director helming movie-within-a-movie The Georgetown Project, aptly cuts straight to the heart of The Exorcism when he describes his production as “psychological wrapped in a horror movie.” The horror is just a supporting player meant to boost the drama here, not a reinvention or dissection of the possession horror formula. Miller leans more into the atmosphere, at least at first, with a dark, shadow-filled color palette as moody as the film’s somber tone.
There are jump scares aplenty, but they’re tied more to Anthony’s increasingly erratic behavior as Lee grows more terrified of her father in their own home. It’s a spacious but ramshackle apartment haunted by the loss of Lee’s mom. That alone would warrant Anthony’s slide backward toward darkness, compounded by the constant pressures of his job and an unempathetic boss. But The Exorcism also provides Anthony with a disturbing traumatic past that makes him almost violently allergic to religion in the present, for good reason.
It creates more than enough emotional baggage for Crowe and Simpkins to sink their teeth into, and that’s before Lee meets and falls for an actress she meets on dad’s set, Blake Holloway (Chloe Bailey, “Swarm“). Of course, the actors more than rise to the occasion here, injecting enough pathos and rooting interest to effectively draw viewers into their fractured family. That goes far as Miller and Fortin work to converge the varying threads and social commentaries into a cohesive whole.
Miller uses The Georgetown Project film set as the stage for Anthony to work out his demons, figuratively and otherwise, with art imitating life through possession horror. It’s an inspired concept in theory, but the film’s climax instead feels abridged and overly edited into a commercially appealing, conventional horror finale that betrays some of the bolder themes.
The Exorcism operates more like a Trojan horse. This isn’t a horror movie but a family drama that wields horror as a tool to work through trauma and grief. In working through that, The Exorcism winds up subverting more than a few tired tropes and reimagines a few ideas introduced in The Exorcist. But it’s not the horror that makes Miller’s feature work; it’s the complex characters and the compelling performances. It ultimately makes for a film that’s divided and at war with itself: the psychological family drama that’s too ambitious in scope versus the studio-mandated horror movie that audiences are expecting. The former is what provides The Exorcism with identity, even if it can’t fully corral all of its moving parts in a cohesive way.
It’s a film with rich potential that’s largely wasted in favor of conventional scares.
The Exorcism releases in theaters on June 21, 2024.
