The Exorcism of Emily Rose: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

"The Exorcism of Emily Rose" isn't what you might expect from a movie about an exorcism gone awry. Levitating tweens, rails of pea soup, and young ladies who lose their manners and their bladders at cocktail parties have no place here.

Instead, what audiences get is "The Trial of Father Moore."

The film is courtroom drama first, an exorcism second. That might disappoint those who would prefer a horror movie focused solely on the expelling of the anti-Christ, but take heart. When it comes to telling the difference between demons and lawyers, the lines of evil are blurred here, with both having their day in hell.

Directed by Scott Derrickson from a script he co-wrote with Paul Harris Boardman, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" is based on the real-life case of Anneliese Michel, a young Bavarian woman diagnosed with epilepsy in her youth who later died in 1976 after undergoing an exorcism.

Some assumed Anneliese was predisposed to seeing evil, so sensitive to the paranormal that it entered her body and transformed it. Others placed the blame on what they assumed were Grand Mal seizers, which allegedly warped her mind and paralyzed her body, though there was never any proof that Anneliese had epilepsy.

So what gives? Since that's up for debate, the movie takes the most commercial approach--Tom Wilkinson is Father Moore, the beleaguered priest who botched the exorcism of Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter), a troubled woman raised in a staunchly Catholic household whose soul was overcome by six demons, including Lucifer himself.

Bible in hand, Holy Water at the ready, Father Moore goes through the robust motions of an exorcism--in the middle of a thunderstorm, no less, and on Halloween to boot (the real Anneliese died in July).

His efforts prove in vain. After Emily shrieks in a clutch of foreign tongues, contorts her body like someone out of Cirque du Soleil, and screams at the screen until her capillaries burst along with ours, she curls up in a ball and dies, her eyes rolling back in her head like two poached eggs ready to be pulled from the boiling pot.

Simmering at the core of this movie are Laura Linney as Erin Bruner, the agnostic lawyer who takes Father Moore's case only to be disturbed by "evil forces" herself, and Campbell Scott as Ethan Thomas, the religious prosecutor hired to put Father Moore in jail because the man's actions allegedly pushed Emily to her death.

All of this is manufactured to the point of exhaustion, and while the cast is good and the flashback format does allow us to be voyeurs in the theatrics of Emily's possession, there's something uncomfortably cheap about the fact that we never come to know Emily herself. Here, she's merely an ambiguous, frightened shell, the hook for a movie that derives its entertainment from her suffering.

That's nothing new for the genre, but it's what will prevent "Emily Rose" from being taken as seriously as all involved would have enjoyed.

Grade: C+