The Crucifixion (2017)

The Crucifixion arrives with grim tidings attached: the Tanacu exorcism of 2005, in which a young nun died under the care of a priest who believed a demon had taken up residence in her. The film relocates the horror to a Romanian monastery and a Bucharest jail cell, where a New York journalist named Nicole works through a murder investigation that keeps threatening to become a theological one. The cast is largely Romanian, which suits the setting and spares us the usual parade of accented foreigners. Sophie Cookson carries the lead with a professionalism that never quite becomes personality. She is a woman in a man's profession, and the film notes this about as much as it notes the weather, which is to say not at all.

The central question is whether Sister Adelina was schizophrenic or possessed, and the film treats it as a genuine coin flip. A doctor offers a diagnosis. A bishop offers a press release. The nun's friend offers testimony. Nicole's own dead mother, who chose faith over medicine, hovers at the edges as a private wound instead of a public argument. That is the film's one interesting maneuver: it lets the audience do the debating. No character turns to the camera to explain what we should think about mental illness, or the church, or the credulity of grieving people. The demon, when it finally appears, is a plot mechanism, not a thesis.

What remains is a competent, gloomy exorcism picture with no interest in instructing anyone. There is no economic subtext, no environmental conscience, no meditation on race or identity. The gypsy boy exists to be possessed and to hold down a levitating woman. The monastery exists to be damp. The whole enterprise is content to be a horror film, and in an era when even the damned feel obliged to deliver a sermon, that restraint is its own small mercy.