The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

Father Gabriele Amorth returns in Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist, a 2023 supernatural horror picture in which Russell Crowe rides a scooter, delivers a winking Italian accent, and wrestles a demon named Asmodeus out of a possessed boy in a Spanish abbey. It is pulpy, brisk, and content to be a genre exercise. The film adapts Amorth's memoirs, which lends the proceedings a faint documentary gravity that the third act promptly squanders on a buried cage and a Vatican cover-up.

The supporting cast offers a Black bishop in Cornell John's Lumumba and a Hispanic co-lead in Daniel Zovatto's Esquibel, both present without editorial comment. Race never becomes a subject; it is merely a fact of the ensemble. The women fare worse. Alex Essoe's Julia and Laurel Marsden's Amy exist to be threatened, choked, and intermittently inhabited, their entire interior life reduced to maternal protectiveness. The screenplay gestures at the mental-illness-versus-possession debate and hands us a trauma-mute boy, then treats both as mechanics for scares, not as windows into neurodivergent experience.

The Vatican surfaces as a secretive institution burying a possessed founder of the Spanish Inquisition. That is anti-institutional posturing, not a critique of capital, and no environmental concern disturbs the crypt. No sermonizing arrives either. The film prefers jump scares to moral instruction, letting its themes of faith and sacrifice emerge through genre beats. The possessed body is a horror spectacle, never a vessel for self-acceptance. What we get is a handsomely mounted B-movie that flirts with cultural relevance and then declines to commit, wanting the conspiracy and the crucifix while taking neither seriously enough to offend anyone in the pews or the press row. The demon is dispatched. The discourse is not invited.

(Note: This is a book adaptation and draws on the real-life figure of Father Gabriele Amorth.)

{

"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation", "true_story"]

}