The opening title card reads
“Inspired by actual accounts,” which is distinct from “Based on a true story”
in that it reads closer to “Somebody of indeterminate credibility claims
something like this happened but mostly we made it up.” Which is understandable
given that we’re watching a movie where a guy spontaneously bleeds from
injuries inflicted by an invisible crown of thorns and features several
incidents that could prove libellous for the NYPD. The filmmakers need to cover
their collective ass. They also need to imply that what we’re seeing could’ve
happened, Satan is real, and when the going gets tough you want to find yourself
an hunky ex-junky Latino priest. Those guys are hard-core.
Deliver Us From
Evil takes place in 2013, a year in which New York apparently suffered
constant brownouts and torrential downpours. Officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana)
gets a hunch one night—his partner calls this Sarchie’s “radar”—and accepts a call
to investigate a domestic dispute involving a wife beater who acts like a rabid
dog. The radar keeps going off over the ensuing nights and Sarchie winds up
fending off large zoo animals, getting bitten by a lady who threw her kid in a
ravine, witnessing an exploding corpse and befriending the aforementioned hunky
ex-junky (Carlos star Édgar Ramírez),
who gradually convinces Sarchie that his radar is really a God-given gift for
sniffing evil and that he’ll need to confront his sinful past if he’s ever
going to beat the Devil.
Sarchie is a real-life retired cop and demonologist. He
co-founded the New York chapter of the New England Society of Psychic Research
and has worked with the likes of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were themselves
the subject of a horror movie, last year’s The
Conjuring. To Bana’s credit, movie-Sarchie’s eventual conversion to belief
in demonic possession is barely foreshadowed. The arc of Deliver Us From Evil, its story an amalgamation of events
chronicled in Sarchie’s memoir Beware the
Night, is given shape by Sarchie’s reluctant acceptance of his calling.
Which brings us to our director and co-scenarist Scott
Derrickson, who I confess to finding somewhat fascinating. Following a wildly
unnecessary remake of The Day the Earth
Stood Still and the haunted house movie Sinister,
Deliver Us From Evil returns
Derrickson, who was raised a Christian fundamentalist, to the thematic terrain
of his feature debut The Exorcism of
Emily Rose, a thriller-as-thesis statement exploring the mental illness
versus demonic possession question and came out on the side of ambiguity and
general tolerance of other people’s spiritual beliefs. That film, goofy as it
was, works better than Deliver Us From
Evil, which nosedives into overstatement and can’t resist a protracted
operatic demon-outing climax that strains the “actual accounts” claim well past
its breaking point.
Still, I feel friendly toward Evil. Derrickson’s a rare bird, both a true believer and a young
director trying to navigate Hollywood—he’s said to be helming a Doctor Strange adaptation next. I think
this film could have used more of the believer and less of the showman, but at
least it keeps a sense of humour about itself, particularly with regards to its
winking references to Poltergeist and Taxi Driver and a fun motif involving The Doors, whose music seems to follow Sarchie around.
People are strange, just like the song says, so why can’t we have a morose Iraq
vet-turned-house painter and lion whisperer who recites Latin and goes to work
in the middle of the night made up like Alice Cooper?
