NYPD vs 666

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?

             

Haunted housework

Ed Warren was the only non-ordained demonologist recognized by the Vatican. His wife Lorraine claims to be clairvoyant. The couple founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952 and made a career out of conducting investigations into—and, when required, interventions with—the paranormal. If their names ring a bell, however faintly, it’s probably on account of their most famous case, one involving a house in Amityville, Long Island, the subject of a movie I used to sneak behind my parents’ couch to watch late at night when I was a child and it seemed to be on TV all the time.

The Conjuring, on which Lorraine Warren served as consultant, renders another of their remarkable cases into a “based on real events” horror film. To what degree those real events have been exaggerated or wholly invented, either by the Warrens or by screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes, is hard to say. There were times in the second half of The Conjuring where I felt that more restraint would have gone a long way toward helping me suspend my disbelief. Still, the film, directed by James Wan, is easily one of the most effective entries into the haunted house subgenre in years.

The Conjuring takes place on Rhode Island in 1971. The Warrens are played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, costumed to resemble Puritans making some lame attempt to look semi-hip. Their performances exude respect for the Warrens and their claims, though Wilson’s willingness to let Ed come off as something of a well-meaning square imbues the role with some pleasing texture. The Warrens’ services are solicited by Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and Roger Perron (Ron Livingston), a working-class couple who recently moved into an enormous bargain-priced farmhouse with their four rambunctious daughters. The house needs many repairs, but such tactile concerns are quickly dwarfed by inexplicable rancid odours, pictures that keep falling off the walls, and clocks that keep stopping at 3.07 a.m. Carolyn starts developing enormous bruises she can’t account for and one of the girls sees a figure standing behind her bedroom door declaring that it wants her family dead. For a while, at least some of these unnerving developments could be regarded as manifestations of the sorts of anxieties any family might feel when relocating to a secluded place and starting a new life without much financial security. Like so many ghost stories, The Conjuring plays as a cautionary tale about dubious real estate investments.

Of course, the creepy incidents accumulate well past the point of ambiguity, and things get bad enough for the Warrens to call in an exorcist. But even as The Conjuring starts to exhibit full-on supernatural phenomena, Wan wisely measures the atmospherics. In keeping with the period, the film derives a certain flavor from horror films of the ’70s, in its use of devices such as ostentatious push-ins, for example—though an incredibly elaborate follow-shot feels very much of this century. There’s a clever POV shot taken from under a bed, and a sequence in the Perrons’ basement that shrewdly limits the soundtrack to only what is picked up by Ed’s microphone. Wan’s mature style (as opposed to the style employed in films like Saw) is put to much better use here than it was in the overrated, undercooked and fussily designed Insidious, and thanks to Taylor especially—who really gets put through the ringer—the film’s engagement is sustained to a substantial degree on account of the cast, which is not a claim most contemporary horror films, so often dependent on tired tropes and boo moments, can make.