This movie features Anthony Hopkins as a Welsh priest called Lucas. Based in Rome, he’s the Vatican’s go-to exorcist. With a fine line in caustic wit and a very big belly, he looks like a formidable opponent for evil. It doesn’t take long to figure out how Hopkins got the ginormous gut he’s carrying around here. (He looks like a barrel with legs.) The actor, once celebrated for his extraordinary subtlety, has calibrated his performance in The Rite, it seems, as an exercise in scenery chewing. You get the impression Hopkins might start chowing down on the supporting cast, like newcomer Colin O’Donoghue, who plays Michael, a Yank Catholic seminarian who, as the movie would have it, has never quite had a fix on his spiritual mojo. In the great tradition of Hollywood pics that mix priests and evil, we know from the get go that what Michael needs is a one-on-one with the Devil. That kind of encounter is certain to straighten him out, spiritually speaking, and raise his stocks in Heaven.
It’s easy to be snide and mean about The Rite. It’s the kind of movie that makes exorcism out to be as important a health issue as cancer, which is to say it’s sanctimonious and earnest. And since it’s a horror film, it also aims to be scary as hell (well, you’d think so). Director Mikael Håfström has tricked it out with a style that’s very modern-horror. He uses macro shots to produce spookily over-sized close-ups of objects and anatomy, and wide-angle lenses that distort the image – under the pressure of this technique spaces expand and contract. The effect, used deftly, is disorienting and disturbing. In The Rite, I think it’s there to shift the focus away from the fact that the scares are minimal and the drama is barely there. Then there’s the ear-splitting sound design, especially in the bottom frequencies. Cinematographer Ben Davis gives the look that gloomy black-on-black sheen that started in recent Japanese horror and is now very fashionable with DOPs everywhere it seems. The light in The Rite is so low-key it’s odd that the faces of the cast aren’t fixed in a permanent squint.
The credits explain that The Rite was 'suggested by" Matt Baglio’s factual book about modern day exorcism, which I have not read. Apparently, it accepts both the phenomenon and the Catholic Church’s practice with a stern certitude. End credits tell us that the Vatican has a school for exorcists. (Incidentally, the exorcist school is depicted in The Rite; it looks like a cross between a US forces hi-tech briefing room and the Rebel HQ in Star Wars.) Furthermore, the end-crawl tells us that there seems to be a plague of demons out there right now, with hundreds and hundreds of exorcisms under way... These might be 'facts’ but that doesn’t give us style; there’s nothing earthy, every day, and documentary about The Rite. It’s pure Hollywood Gothic, with a story bound tight in perfectly symmetrical movie-logic psychology.
O’Donoghue’s character is full of guilt; he sees mystery in the world, strange coincidences, as well as pain"¦ and yet, he doesn’t accept God. Just before completing his priesthood he is sent to the Vatican where he meets Hopkins’ Lucas, whose house seems to have been designed and modelled on the doctor’s one in Universal’s Frankenstein (1931). Lucas gets Michael involved in the case of a teen who’s pregnant (perhaps by her own father) and who, it seems, is the grip of a demon. Suffice to say Michael is 'tested’.
The Rite ends the way all such movies must: with a long, loud set-piece between Good and Evil. If you you’ve seen The Exorcist (1973), you’ll know what to expect. But there’s no pea soup or head-spinning. But I can promise physical transformations and creepy voices.
The Rite is a bit of a cheat on its own terms. The priests here aren’t intellectuals or theologians or even men of the people; they’re like warriors or soldiers. It reduces spirituality simply to the spooky stuff. Some critics have complained that the movie is unambiguously religious and conservative. That seems overstating what’s, after all, a pretty modest offering. The Rite is devoted alright – to exorcising all thought with an arsenal of would-be scare tactics.
