It’s odd that films about demonic possession are usually the weakest of horror cinema’s tea. In the notion of a monster entering and controlling you there is the possibility for anything. An entity beyond time and morality seizing you and raiding the bank vaults of your personality and turning your fears, insecurities, and taboos inside out for everyone to see. The latent potency of such a set-up, especially amidst the terror of exposure that grips our current age, may explain why filmmakers are so afraid of it. These days, even our demons need P.R. managers and sensitivity trainers, because if they’re evil it must mean the people who imagined them are as well, and that could earn one a scarlet letter.
Possession films often indulge in a very tired kind of karaoke then, singing a rip-off of a rip-off of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” which turns 50 this year and has a vitality that would shame the neutered films of his grandchildren’s generation, including David Gordon Green’s “The Exorcist: Believer.” True possession can’t be imagined because it might lead us down dangerous corridors. So we must rely on old, dull, harmless parlor tricks: green vomit, skin that resembles molded bathroom caulk, and a few self-conscious profanities that wouldn’t raise the eyebrows of most middle-schoolers.
The most laughable element of “Believer,” and there’s plenty of competition, is Green’s suggestion that the demon hounding two pre-teen girls in Georgia is the same entity that terrorized Linda Blair’s Regan in “The Exorcist.” If this is true, this is a much more polite demon; perhaps years spent out in the woods have defanged it. Rather than forcing the girls to say unprintable things that challenge a parent’s deepest fears, the best it can do here is to have a girl chant “the body and the blood” during a church sermon. Danny McBride has a story credit on this film, as he did on Green’s three “Halloween” movies, which are works of high classicism next to this one. Are you telling me that McBride unleashed in a writer’s room couldn’t do better than that?
Say what you will about Green’s “Halloween” movies, but he did seem to be interested in playing with the iconography of that series. Said play was crushingly literal-minded, but he seemed to be engaged. “Believer” is the work of a hack strip-mining a trend. Green is surgical in his determination to play ball by the rules of reboot culture: hit those references, trot out those legacy players, and water down whatever was raw about the source material in case the next generation is too tepid for the uncut stuff. In the new “Scream” movies, a cast bland enough for a Target commercial can’t die, which is a buzzkill for a slasher movie. In this “Exorcist,” demonic possession is turned into a celebration of collaboration between various races and religious beliefs. Because we know how flexible people often are about race and religion. When even horror films become fodder for civics lessons, we know that art’s potential for dangerousness is truly imperiled.
Green stumbles upon an intriguing idea during his pandering. The two girls beset by a demon in “Believer” are Black and white, respectively, and their families have differing religious convictions. Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), father of Angela (Lidya Jewett) is an atheist following a disaster many years earlier because terrible movies always attribute attitudes of which they disapprove to disasters many years earlier. Meanwhile, the parents of Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) are very Southern and very Christian, and it is suggested that the two families are going to come to blows over how to treat their children’s malady. There are the makings here for a scenario that’s thorny and difficult—dramatic in other words. Add a demon into the mix, who is supposed to be capable of saying and doing anything, even things which might raise the hackles of a corporation’s H.R. protocol, and you’ve got the possibility for a horror film that cauterizes modern tensions about race, religion, parenting—you name it. This is fertile ground, and even this year’s generally blah “Evil Dead Rise” allowed its demons a refreshing hint of blasphemy.
Since “thorny and difficult” might not pack ‘em in fast enough to recoup this movie’s budget in two weekends, before people hear how godawfully boring it is, Green sidesteps these possibilities. Instead, Green brings Ellen Burstyn back for an embarrassing glorified cameo, revealing her, in the tradition of his concept of Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween,” to have greeted trauma by becoming a girl-boss expert in said trauma. Burstyn is a superb actor, and she and Odom Jr. give this nonsense a conviction that it doesn’t deserve, but there’s only so much anyone can do with material this desperate and unengaged. Does it ever occur to Green or other reboot hacks that surviving legendary trauma might make you into a basket case? There are people who can’t let go of a disappointing prom night, let alone being invaded by a demon or having all their friends stabbed to death overnight.
This sense of obsession and sickness and distortion in the face of the unimaginable did occur to Rob Zombie, who made the painful, hallucinatory, sickeningly violent, gallingly underrated “Halloween II” in 2009, a few years before “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” turned reboots into a genre. But Zombie didn’t get the memo that real movies don’t matter in the nostalgia business. They are unwelcome, in fact.
Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” is a much stronger and more potent piece of work than “The Exorcist: Believer,” but then so is virtually every other movie that I’ve seen this year. Beneath the film’s confident craftsmanship are issues that link it subtly with “Believer.” Namely, timidity, preachiness, and a devotion to the trite. Like “Believer,” “The Royal Hotel” is eclipsed by an older and wilder movie, in this case Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Outback thriller/character study, “Wake in Fright.”
“Wake in Fright” is about a man washing up in the Outback and gradually sliding into the primordial ooze of bored, drunk, oversexed ruffians. Kotcheff, who also directed “First Blood,” which is much better than the general “Rambo” legacy might lead you to remember, shows in each film a flair for catching in camera the true wildness of an untamed atmosphere. “Wake in Fright” is a vivid sensory feast, disturbing for suggesting how much our environment shapes our personalities. We are fungible, fragile. “The Royal Hotel” reaffirms this fragility by reminding us how beholden modern movies are to certain catch-all messages in the wake of #MeToo. The two women who find themselves out in a terrain similar to that of “Wake in Fright” don’t implicate the audience. One of them has temptations, sure, but they are steely and capable of preserving their identity in the face of evil men. At the end, they commit an elaborate and appalling act of destruction that is celebrated by Green as girl-bosses taking charge.
Green can’t be discounted though, as she is a real and talented filmmaker. The male drunks of “The Royal Hotel” are a vivid lot, especially the bar owner played by an extraordinary and nearly unrecognizably gone-to-seed Hugo Weaving. The bar owner’s partner, Carol (Ursula Yovich), is the most nuanced character in the film, a women appalled by the cavemen around her who swallows down, day by day, just enough bile to live with the trap that is her life. As in her prior feature, the equally accomplished “The Assistant,” Green keeps the tension percolating. Her stars, Julia Garner, returning from “The Assistant,” and Jessica Henwick, are convincing even if they are sketched by Green as being little more than avatars of endangered womanliness.
There is a moment in “The Royal Hotel” in which Garner’s character says that she’s not strong but afraid, and here Green seems to be affirming Emily Blunt’s refreshing confession that she’s tired of reading parts that are conceived only in terms of their strength. “Strong, empowered woman” can be as condescending as stereotypical sexpot roles, as power fetishization is a different way of selling human reduction for branding purposes. The difference between superficially empowered female characters and sexpots is that one of those reductions is currently politically correct. The ending of “The Royal Hotel” is glib and, as set up by Green, wildly unbelievable, irresponsible and nihilistic, but at least women get to be girl-bossing.
Modern social-messaging metrics get to be met.
“The Exorcist: Believer” and “The Royal Hotel” are in theaters today.
