It's easy to make fun of demons while you're still in the theater...
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When serial killers, extraterrestrials and Rob Schneider all fail to terrify, Hollywood can still pull out the ol' demonic-possession card to make us feel nervous when we get up to go wee in the middle of the night. It's not really such a preposterous idea, or anyway not as preposterous as Rob Schneider, since we employ metaphors of possession all the time ("I don't know what I was thinking"; "Something made me do it"; "He's just not himself," etc.). Our very language conditions us to experience some states as ego-alien, with the possibility of being compelled to do and say frightening things that are somehow beyond our control.
***image3***This, alas, is the fate of poor Emily Rose (
White Chicks
' Jennifer Carpenter), who is apparently possessed because she attended university on a scholarship: "She was such a happy girl before she went away," explains her traumatized mother after her daughter's very messy demon-induced death, which happens just before the film begins. (Let that be a lesson to those of you starting college this fall.) As an aghast medical examiner closes the creaky farmhouse door behind him, not letting us see what horrors lie inside, we begin to feel proleptically skittish.
Unfortunately, the film never quite lives up to this early promise-maybe because its genre is muddled from the get-go. Director Scott Derrickson has announced with some pride that
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
may be "the first courtroom horror drama"; it may well also be the last. When family priest Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) chooses to perform an (unsuccessful) exorcism on the slavering Emily rather than just encouraging her to take her meds, he's on trial for negligent homicide, and it's up to ambitious junior attorney Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), who's agnostic, to defend him. Tempers flare as Bruner and the piously Christian prosecutor (Campbell Scott) debate whether Emily's death was caused by foul denizens of the underworld or whether she suffered from what her doctor refers to as "Epileptic-Psychotic Disorder."
Carpenter, an actress without much to do but eat bugs, rave in Latin and contort herself athletically, throws everything she has into portraying the tortured possessee; before the exertions of demonic inhabitation take their toll, she has a pretty and innately unsettling face, with a long, twisted mouth and dark eyes hinting at the preternatural. The prodigious talents of Wilkinson (
In the Bedroom
) and Linney (
You Can Count on Me
) here aren't much to write home about, thanks to a screenplay that's alternately gripping and slack. What can Wilkinson do when he has to mutter lines like, "There are forces surrounding this trial...dark, powerful forces"; Linney doesn't come off much better, brittle and irritating as the clichéd single woman who drinks too many martinis.
Nonetheless
Emily Rose
is surprisingly spry in places, especially the fleeting moments in which Wilkinson and Linney spar, providing welcome relief from all the slobbering, wallpaper-shredding and bloodcurdling screams.
Emily Rose
is at its best when Derrickson gets out of the way and leaves more to the imagination. While it's never really clear why all the metaphysical forces of evil would be quite so interested in an 18-year-old coed, if nothing else, it's a guarantee you'll never view 3 am in quite the same way again.
