Deliver Us from Evil (2014)

Scott Derrickson's 2014 possession procedural arrives with the full Bruckheimer apparatus: a Bronx setting, a lapsed Catholic sergeant, a Jesuit with a cross in his coat pocket, and a demon who has learned to speak through a Marine. Eric Bana plays Ralph Sarchie as a man whose faith has curdled into procedure. The film is competent, atmospheric, and almost entirely uninterested in saying anything about the world it depicts. That is not a criticism. It is a classification.

The cast is agreeably multiethnic without ever becoming a statement. Édgar Ramírez, Dorian Missick, and Valentina Rendón occupy their roles as working professionals, not as arguments. Race is present and unexamined. Olivia Munn's Jennifer is a wife who waits at home and is eventually abducted, a function the screenplay never troubles to expand. The theology arrives through Mendoza's explanation of primary and secondary evil, a passage lifted from the source book's preface and delivered as plot mechanics, not as sermon. The film gestures at moral weight and then returns to the basement.

Marketing described the picture as inspired by actual accounts while the screenplay remained largely original, a modest bit of costume jewelry pinned to a fiction. Beyond that, the film has no cultural program to advance. No economic critique, no environmental conscience, no reclamation of history. The antagonist is a demon, which is the oldest excuse in the genre and, in this case, an honest one. The Doors on the soundtrack do more ideological work than the script. A routine exorcism picture, then, and a fairly tidy one. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it barely asks that.