The Exorcism of God (2022)

The Exorcism of God arrives with the confidence of a picture that knows exactly what it is. An American priest in a small Mexican town botches an exorcism, spends eighteen years doing penance, and then watches his past crawl back out of a prison cell. There is a demon named Balban. There is a daughter nobody knew about. There is a great deal of screaming in Spanish and English, and a finale that ends with a grin suggesting the devil won. It is a possession movie, assembled from standard parts, with no ambition beyond frightening the people who bought tickets.

The classification work here is mercifully brief. The cast is largely Latin American because the story is set in Mexico, and the presence of Joseph Marcell is a matter of hiring a good actor, not of making a statement. The women exist to be entered by demons or to bear the children of that violation. The theology is transactional: sin, confession, and the fine print of a bargain with hell. Nobody pauses to indict the market, the climate, or the body. The prison is a location, not a metaphor for the carceral state. The plague killing the town's children is a plot device, not a public health parable.

We are left with a horror film that wants to gross us out and occasionally succeeds. The Guardian called it a big, gaudy, overblown altarpiece, and that seems fair. It has no interest in improving anyone. Its moral universe is medieval, its imagery is wet and loud, and its final act trades redemption for damnation without a flicker of modern conscience. In a decade of cinema that often mistakes the sermon for the story, this one simply wants to scare us. There is something almost restful about that. The picture earns its classification by refusing to earn anything else.