A strange thing happened when I sat down to review The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. I started playing the DVD in my old Apex player, when the player started growling loudly like a son of a gun--the disc was off center, which caused it to wobble violently. But the growling sound my player made seemed fitting--after all, since the movie was about demonic possession, what better way to get in the mood than to have your player start snarling like a rabid Linda Blair who’s warming up her demonically possessed vocal cords before meeting Father Merrin? Where are the Ghostbusters when you need them, and do they handle demonic appliances?
Possessed DVD players aside, the Exorcism Of Emily Rose works its magic on the viewer by starting off as a crackling good legal thriller. A young woman, 19 year old Emily Rose (very well played by Jennifer Carpenter), is found dead in her bedroom by police, who arrest her family priest, Father Richard Moore (the always good Tom Wilkinson), who they claim killed the young woman in a botched exorcism. The defense of Father Moore is handed to attorney Erin Bruner (the superb Laura Linney), who’s flush with success from her recent case, where she defended an accused murderer, which ended in an acquittal. Erin, bucking for a partnership in her lavish law firm, takes Moore’s case.
While Father Moore denies killing Emily Rose, he claims he doesn’t care about whether he goes to jail or not; all that matters to him is getting Emily’s story out to the public. For despite Erin’s reluctance to accept that the supernatural is real, Father Moore firmly believes that Emily was possessed, and he warns Erin that, because of her involvement in this sensational case, she has now become a target of those very same demons. Reportedly based on a true story, co-producer Paul Harris Boardman and director Scott Derrickson, who both co-wrote the script, have done a marvelous job in turning what could have been a bad Exorcist rip off into a gripping, chilling thriller with some genuinely scary horror movie moments.
By using the courtroom thriller setting, the makers of TEOER smartly explore Emily’s possession--told here entirely in flashbacks--from both sides of the coin: showing us the same scenes from the POV of a more sensible, scientific explanation (she was suffering from mental illness), as well as from the POV of an all-out horror film that shows Emily’s possession in all of its gruesome detail. Jennifer Carpenter, best known from Dexter, really shines in these flashback sequences, as she plays an innocent young woman who’s haplessly caught in the grip of an unknown, malevolent force. The intelligent script, backed by such great actors like Linney, Wilkinson and Campbell Scott as the prosecutor, raises The Exorcism Of Emily Rose well above the usual hack and slash horror films that has so permeated the genre. If you’re looking for an excellent, tremendously scary horror flick that also gives you food for thought, then give this one a try. --SF
Main Review Page | The Exorcism of Emily Rose On DVD
