Review: The Last Exorcism

Director Daniel Stamm’s new supernatural thriller The Last Exorcism has the potential to be a true sleeper, at once a horror film of considerable psychological complexity deftly infused with some very funny satire and a handful of compelling performances. Much like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, this scrappy movie-within-a-movie gets the job done at a rapid clip with some solid scares and surprisingly well-developed characters.

What you might not guess by the film’s ad campaign is just how perceptive and smart a satire it is, coming fast and furious from the character of a cynical preacher superbly played by Patrick Fabian as a wily Southern huckster and lapsed Christian, fully transparent about duping Jesus freaks in need of spiritual salvation. Take the money and run, indeed. He meets his match when a troubled young girl displays signs of an actual possession and needs deliverance from either her backwoods family, the devil or both.

Evangelical Louisiana preacher Cotton Marcus (Fabian) is a self-admitted sham, a family man with a loving wife and ten-year-old son, himself born into the ministry and following in his father’s footsteps as a fire and brimstone showman capable of selling anything to his congregation, and I do mean selling. He makes no bones about exploiting his flock for monetary gain and in his spare time performs fake exorcisms (complete with props that include a steaming crucifix and tablets that boil water) for desperate country folk who hand over cash for deliverance from evil.

Marcus, perhaps feeling a tinge of guilt, allows a documentary film crew to ride shotgun for what he decides will be his last exorcism, traveling deep into the sticks for what he believes will be the usual performance. What he finds is the creepy Sweetzer family, at the center of which is a troubled and sheltered young Nell (Ashley Bell, a knockout), withdrawn after her mother’s untimely cancer demise and living in a family of strange men, including a fundamentalist father (Louis Herthum) and a slightly off-kilter brother (Caleb Landry), channeling Deliverance in a very creepy early scene.

The family’s livestock are being slaughtered and the father believes the devil is in his daughter, who has been acting strangely, sleepwalking and exhibiting odd behaviors. Is she undergoing a psychological manifestation related to her mother’s death? Is she possessed by a demon? Is there something more sinister afoot in the family?

Admittedly, there is nothing truly original about The Last Exorcism’s faux documentary approach, but where the film excels is in its very intelligent screenplay by Huck Botland and Andrew Gurland, and in Fabian’s star turn of impeccable wit and energy. What makes the film work is that Cotton Marcus is a genuinely interesting and dimensional character, unlike so many in horror pictures that are nearly always an afterthought of special effects and gore.

So here we have a Southern Gothic morality play, suspicions of the devil and a gritty looking low-budget picture thick with Louisiana atmosphere and a sense of festering mental illness and rising evil, acted with such conviction that its central question—whether its young heroine is really in the throes of possession or something maybe worse—plays as much like psychosomatic projection as it does supernatural affliction.

Stamm, a German ex-pat who studied at AFI and once made a film about indie rocker Nick Cave before studying hypnosis and hitchhiking across America, displays a notably balanced hand with the satire and shocks, none of which go over-the-top and keep us guessing.

Only in the film’s climax does The Last Exorcism take a conventional turn in both narrative and filmmaking technique, leaning on a the shopworn device of a secret Satanic cabal that threatens to break its spell. Until then, it’s a smart, scary, thought-provoking film and a real surprise particularly from its dynamic star.

- Lee Shoquist