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?

             

I see dead movie: The Haunting in Connecticut

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” durable Christian matriarch Sarah Campbell asks during the baffling, pointless and ultimately shelved faux-documentary framing device of The Haunting in Connecticut. A better question might have been why good actors wind up in bad movies. Why, for the love of god, is Virginia Madsen playing Sarah, a one-note protagonist required above all to cough up countless variations on hysterical worry? Why is Martin Donovan, so deft with deadpan comedy in Hal Hartley films, playing Peter Campbell, a dopey workin’ dad in baggy plaid shirts whose one big, very silly scene finds him smashing his guitar in melodramatic despair? Above all, why the hell is the woefully underused Elias Koteas playing an overly reverential reverend in this mostly limpid, paralyzingly generic haunted house horror (see Amityville, Poltergeist et al)? Perhaps the scariest thing in The Haunting in Connecticut is the implications it poses to any non-megastar yet talented actor over the age of 40.


To be sure, there are sources of potential freshness, or at least variation on cliché, in this “based on true story” creeper written by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe and largely dictated by the mechanical escalation of numbingly telegraphed boo moments. The tormented son of Sarah and Peter is receiving excruciating treatments for his cancer and has been warned that he may experience hallucinations. Are the many shadowy figures lurking in the mirrors and his peripheral vision actually ghosts or merely figments of the afflicted imagination of a tragically ill and sheltered teen? There is a cocktail of religiosity, mental illness and youthful vulnerability here that draws a certain kinship with the often laughable but not uninteresting The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Of course the ambiguity lasts about five minutes, and it’s a shame, because it might have held your interest a bit longer had the film kept us in a state of uncertainty and unease.


There is also the film’s attempt at referencing the ectoplasmic imagery of 19th century spirit photography, something I can’t recall ever seeing addressed so explicitly in any other ghosty movie. But the digital renderings of weird stuff flowing up and out of mediums’ mouths under Peter Cornwell’s direction only remind us why those images from the past still fascinate us. They possess an enigmatic, tactile quality that can only translate pitifully into the visual lexicon of painstakingly overworked modern special effects.


In one of the film’s many sepia-toned flashbacks we see a mortician slicing the eyelid off of a corpse. It’s one of the more effective moments, at least on a purely guttural, squirm-inducing level. And it’s a nudge to the audience, a way of saying You Must Watch, invoking the naïve appeal of haunted houses of old, playing with our desire to witness something awful while placing our fingers over our eyes as a pretence of disgust, dismay or dismissal. If only The Haunting in Connecticut could come anywhere near such basic slithery delights. On the contrary, it is precisely the sort of contemporary wrote horror movie that makes you wonder if nearly everyone in the field has simply forgotten how.