The Vatican Tapes (2015)

Somewhere in a vault beneath Vatican City, according to the opening title card, the Church keeps thousands of hours of footage it deems unfit for public consumption. The Vatican Tapes presents itself as the first of these reels, stolen and leaked, then spends its running time being an entirely conventional possession picture about a young woman named Angela, a coma, a psychiatric ward, and a cardinal who arrives too late with his Eucharist and his eggs. It opened in 427 theaters, finished fifteenth for the weekend, and vanished. The critics were unkind. The tape, it turns out, was not the explosive document the framing promised.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably sparse. Michael Peña plays Father Lozano and Djimon Hounsou plays Vicar Imani. Both are capable. Both are simply present, working priests and archivists with no commentary attached to their presence. That is the whole of the film's representational gesture, and it registers as casting rather than argument. Angela is our protagonist and Dr. Richards is her psychiatrist, but the screenplay gives neither of them anything to say about power, gender, or the institutions that fail them. Dr. Richards exists to be taunted in Aramaic. The psychiatric hospital is a staging ground for demonic spectacle, not a portrait of mental illness. There is no wealth to redistribute, no climate to mourn, no body to celebrate, no closet to open, no lesson to deliver.

Theology remains, and it arrives as gore. Angela's parentage inverts the virgin birth, her three eggs mock the Trinity, her resurrection mirrors Christ's. This is blasphemy as special effect, not historical reinterpretation. The film preaches nothing. It has no thesis beyond the one printed on the poster, which is that the devil is real and the archives are deep. A tape in a vault, indeed, and one that earned its sequestration on grounds of dullness alone.