The Last Exorcism

Rating:

Just because you can fake a thing doesn’t mean that thing is fake.

That’s the premise behind “The Last Exorcism,”  and it’s a scary good one.   Southern Baptist(?) preacher Patrick Fabian has been faking it since he was ten, when his father thrust him into a pulpit, because kid preachers make good money.   “We acted like it was a spontaneous movement of the Spirit,”  he says, “but I was well-coached.” Fabian plays the preacher as a good-looking man who knows how to use his charm and charisma to get what he wants.   He’s not a bad man; if pushed, I’d be he could tell you all about all kinds of people who make money by playing upon the fears and hopes of other people.    Of course, the argument would be a pile of malarkey, but he’s very good at convincing people of things he doesn’t believe.  He stopped believing anything he says or does a long time ago.  It’s a profession; he’s a showman. He’s also an exorcist.  He knows all the tricks there, too.

But when a fellow exorcist accidentally kills a little girl while casting out her demons, he suffers a crisis of conscience. He decides that it’s time for the charlatanism to stop.   So he hires a documentary crew to follow him to an exorcism, so that he can show just how fake it is, and all the tricks that exorcists use to make it look real.   (I wish “The Last Exorcism explored the process of arriving at this decision and the ramifications of it; he’s basically running himself out of a job in the only career he’s ever had.  But it’s not that kind of movie.)  Watching Fabian load crucifixes with smoke pellets and string fishing wire from picture frames is a bit like watching a magician reveal his secrets.  Some of it is funny, some of it is horrifying, and some of it is a real letdown – you kind of think you should have guessed it before he showed it to you.

Like a whole scad of recent horror flicks, starting with “The Blair Witch Project,”  this flick utilizes the documentary angle to add a sense of reality to its supernatural proceedings.   What most of those other movies have failed to realize – movies like “Paranormal Activity,” “Cloverfield” and “Quarantine” – is that the same basic rules of scary movies apply, whether you’re using a shaky or steady camera.   Fear – at least movie fear – is more about what you don’t see than what you do.   “Blair Witch” discovered a clever way to keep things off the screen, where they’re the scariest.  “The Last Exorcism” has a better grasp of this than most.   It’s a well-constructed little scare flick, solid through and through.

Fabian  receives a letter from, and then visits, a very remote farm in Louisiana, where a father (Louis Herthum) is worried about his livestock – and the way they’re dying.  He suspects his sweet, naïve very very home-schooled sixteen-year-old daughter (Ashley Bell) is being periodically possessed by the devil.   He also has a fifteen-year-old son (Caleb Landry Jones) who, while he has received no supernatural visitations, is scary enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.  He greets Fabian and the film crew by throwing rocks at their car, then isn’t at all shy about letting the preacher know that if anything bad happens to his sister, he will hurt him.  He seems quite serious and capable.

Fabian goes through his little song and dance, complete with ethereal moaning (via laptop speakers under the bed) and the smoking crucifix, and declares the young woman delivered.  He takes the money and is on his way out the door when weird things start to happen.  Really weird things.   Her father insists she be exorcised again, but Fabian, and the film crew with him, become more and more convinced that the girl needs professional psychological help.

I don’t want to spell out too much of the plot, so let me just say that the reasons why Bell doesn’t receive medical help are plausible, and the reasons why Fabian and the film crew stick around and try to help her, even as the situation deteriorates and the notion of hitting the road becomes more attractive, feel well-written and believable.  And director Daniel Steem carefully controls what we see and what we don’t to maintain an uneasy sense of ambiguity.   Is something supernatural going on, or is Fabian not the only one faking it?   This balance is kept until the abrupt and thrilling ending, which feels straight out of “Rosemary’s Baby.”   Many people in the theater where I watched “The Last Exorcism” were very unhappy with the way it ended, but it felt exactly right and appropriate to me: not everything can be resolved, and not all mysteries can be answered by science, or, for heaven’s sake, a camera.