Priest (2011)

Priest arrives from 2011, a year when the culture still permitted a vampire film to concern itself chiefly with vampires. Paul Bettany plays a warrior cleric in an alternate world where humanity spent centuries losing a war to photosensitive albino cave-dwellers, and where the Church, having won, retired its holy assassins to lives of quiet irrelevance. His niece is taken. He breaks his vows, collects a wasteland sheriff and a former comrade in arms, and rides out. It is a lean, grim, handsomely art-directed exercise in the post-apocalyptic western, adapted loosely from a Korean comic and owing more to John Ford than to any contemporary moral program.

The cast is more polyglot than the genre usually bothers with, and Maggie Q's Priestess is given genuine competence, a motorcycle, and a suicide run at a locomotive she somehow survives on foot. The film declines to make anything of this. She is a capable ally, not an argument. Nor does the picture have any interest in the racial, economic, or environmental readings available to it. The villain is a theocratic tyrant in a black hat, the vampire reservations are set dressing, and the ash-clouded sky is a tactical problem, never a parable. There are no queer characters, no sermons on the body, no neurodivergent arcs. The only thematic friction on offer targets ecclesiastical authoritarianism, and it lasts about as long as it takes to throw a severed vampire head onto a cathedral floor.

Critics were unkind, citing clichés, and they were not wrong, though the film's visual discipline deserved better than it got. It remains a relic of a moment before every genre picture was expected to carry a thesis. We classify it accordingly: a handsome, derivative, largely harmless entertainment that asks nothing of its audience but ninety minutes and a tolerance for slow motion. The sommelier's verdict is a thin vintage. Pleasant enough. Nearly free of the cultural sediment we have trained ourselves to detect.