Prey for the Devil (2022)

Prey for the Devil arrives with a premise that looks, on paper, like a modest progress report from the exorcism industry. A young nun, Sister Ann, is admitted to a reopened exorcism school despite the Church's long-standing prohibition on women performing the rite. The film treats this as a genre complication, not a tract. The gender barrier is real within the story, and the screenplay derives some momentum from it, but the emphasis stays on possession, screaming, and the reliable dampness of institutional corridors. The feminist reading is available, and the film does not actively resist it, yet it never organizes itself around a thesis. It wants to scare first and make a point second, if at all.

The cast includes Black and Latino actors in clerical roles, which gives the film a slightly more varied Vatican than the subgenre usually permits. The movie does not comment on this, which is fine. Race is not a subject here, nor is sexuality, nor climate, nor wealth, nor body image, nor neurodivergence. The script uses mental instability as a plot mechanism, a thing to be explained by demons, and then moves on. There is no revisionist history to speak of, unless we count the notion that the Catholic Church would reopen exorcism schools after a global surge in possession, which is less historical correction and more franchise maintenance.

As a piece of sermonizing, the film is restrained. It offers a mild undercurrent about women being allowed to do the work, then returns to the business of rattling bedframes. The result is a competent-looking possession potboiler with a few ideas it never fully commits to. It is not a lecture. It is barely a homily. The devil, as ever, gets the best scenes, and the audience gets a C+ worth of spiritual unease.