The Reel Review
When an emotionally-troubled actor starts behaving erratically during the production of an exorcism horror movie, his teenage daughter wonders whether his prior drug and alcohol addictions are resurfacing or if something more sinister is causing this shocking instance of life imitating art. Russell Crowe and Ryan Simpkins star in this supernatural horror.
The film is supposed to be an homage of sorts to all those urban legends about horror movie sets being plagued by real life supernatural and sinister behavior. But co-writer/director Joshua John Miller (son of actor Jason Miller, who was nominated for an Oscar for playing Father Karras in the 1973 classic The Exorcist) commits the cardinal sin of an exorcism film – it is immensely dull and boring. Technical elements of the film are also problematic, with a lot of frustratingly dim lighting and audio that is at times so low as to be incomprehensible.
Crowe seems to have known going into it that this film was going to be a turkey, giving a phoned-in, “where’s my check?” performance. The one bright spot in this dour drama is Simpkins (the Fear Street trilogy) as his freaked-out daughter. The rest – Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan, Dazed and Confused) as the sleazy director who cares more about his camera shots than his actors, Sam Worthington as a fellow actor and David Hyde Pierce (Frasier) as the on-set priest, all feel like window dressing with little to contribute.
REEL FACTS
• The Exorcism was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina in late 2019, but not released until May 2024, a year after Crowe’s other, only slightly better, exorcism horror, The Pope’s Exorcist.
• The Exorcism earned just under $10 million at the box office, more than half of that internationally.
• Actor Adrian Pasdar, who plays the unfortunate actor in the film’s opening scene, and writer/director Joshua John Miller also appeared together in the 1987 neo-Western vampire horror Near Dark.
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