The Unholy (2021)
Directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos
No — The Unholy is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Unholy concerns a disgraced journalist, a small New England town, and a deaf girl who abruptly begins to speak after an encounter with something calling itself Mary.
Consciousness Markers
The film centers on Alice, a deaf and mute girl whose disability is central to the plot, and features a moderately diverse supporting cast including Christine Adams and Gisela Chipe. However, the representation functions as narrative device rather than deliberate diversity messaging.
There is a young female protagonist, a female physician, and a female villain, and Natalie uses sign language to warn Alice, but the film advances no feminist thesis about patriarchy or gender equity.
The film traffics in good-versus-evil religious moralizing and a cautionary ending about false prophets, but it is delivered through horror spectacle rather than overt preachiness.
The plot involves a disgraced journalist exploiting miracles for career revival and a media frenzy, which lightly gestures at the commodification of faith and fame, but it is not a systemic critique of capitalism.
The cast is somewhat multiracial but race is never addressed or thematized in the story.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body positivity themes or messaging are present.
Deafness is a physical disability, not neurodivergence, and the film does not engage with neurodiversity themes.
The 1845 witchcraft prologue presents a woman accused of Satanic dealings, but it is a straightforward horror trope rather than a revisionist reframing of historical injustice.
Why it received this score
The Unholy concerns a disgraced journalist, a small New England town, and a deaf girl who abruptly begins to speak after an encounter with something calling itself Mary. The something is not the Virgin. It is an 1845 witch who sold her soul, and the miracles are a recruitment drive. This is competent, joyless studio horror, adapted from a James Herbert novel and produced by Sam Raimi, who lent his name and evidently little else. Critics were unkind. Audiences were indifferent. The film made its money anyway, which is its own kind of miracle and the only one on display here.
On representation, Alice's deafness is load-bearing. Her silence and her recovery drive the plot, which makes the disability a mechanism first and a portrait second. The supporting cast is quietly multiracial, and Christine Adams and Gisela Chipe appear without the film ever commenting on the fact. A female physician and a female antagonist occupy the margins. None of this coalesces into an argument about gender or race. The film has no thesis beyond the one it inherited from its source material, and that thesis is theological.
Where the film gestures at larger critique, it does so lightly. Gerry's exploitation of the healings for career rehabilitation touches on the commerce of faith and fame, though the target is one man's vanity, not a system. The moralizing is present and old-fashioned, a warning about false prophets delivered through burning crosses and a girl's sacrifice. That is spectacle, not sermon. The 1845 prologue hangs a woman for witchcraft in the manner horror films have hung women for decades, without reinterpreting the record. It is a modest chiller that aspires to nothing and achieves precisely that.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Alice is a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate. When terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something much more sinister.
Questions about The Unholy
Is The Unholy woke?
No — The Unholy is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Unholy have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (35). On Representation Casting: The film centers on Alice, a deaf and mute girl whose disability is central to the plot, and features a moderately diverse supporting cast including Christine Adams and Gisela Chipe.
How does The Unholy compare to other 2021 movies?
It ranks #176 of the 242 films from 2021 we've scored; their average is 23. The wokest is The Forever Purge (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.