The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

Rating:

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott and Jennifer Carpenter

Review: The Exorcism of Emily Rose is the third notable PG-13 horror-ish thriller to come out this summer (hey, there’s a week left). DarkWater was the creepiest and most artistically satisfying. Kate Hudson’s Skeleton Key was a little flashier, a bit more Hollywood, but it grew low-voltage tension into some great end twists. Third in this unholy trinity, Emily Rose is the least of the lot.

The film opens with a dead girl, left in a battered and emaciated state after her “demonic possession” led to a failed exorcism. The film focuses on the legal case: Is the priest who performed the exorcism responsible for her death? Was it negligent homicide because she needed medical care, not holy water and Latin mumbo jumbo? Or, you know, are there devils in these details?

While Emily’s possession and the exorcism are shown a’plenty in flashbacks, the film is about the priest, played by Tom Wilkinson, and his lawyer, played by Laura Linney. What this means is that the story focuses, ultimately, not on whether Satan wins, but on whether the lawyer does. Admittedly, it can be hard sometimes to distinguish between a lawyer and the devil, but it still kinda sucks out some dramatic tension.

The film has a strong cast. Jennifer Carpenter does some really distressing work as the afflicted girl, contorting her body and raving madly as her demons or dementia progress. Campbell Scott turns into a strange double for Kevin Kline as the prosecutor out to prove that Emily suffered a complicated form of epilepsy, despite, you know, the screaming in Latin and Aramaic. Linney does her utmost with the character of the lawyer and never missteps, you just wish they’d given her more to dance with.

As the film tracks the progress of the case and unfolds Emily’s story, we’re also meant to care about the lawyer. Somehow Linney’s redemption is tied up with the priest’s. Every time we see her out of the courtroom, she’s in a bar, drinking, and she seems to have no personal life. She recently got a murder suspect freed despite what had seemed an open-and-shut case. Midway through the film, the TV news tells us new killings are rumored to have been committed by her freed client, and she looks stricken, but the movie never comes back to this at all. Linney, a story-ready agnostic, does start to wonder whether she’s being haunted by supernatural horrors, too, and in the end, we’re told she’s faced down her own demons just as Emily had to face hers. Only … what demons, exactly? Why do we care about the lawyer, again? Um, who is the lawyer, again?

The producers of The Exorcism of Emily Rose want you to know that it’s based on a true story. They put a note to that effect at the opening of the film, and before the credits roll, they give you vague information about how the story unfolded after the point at which the film leaves off. Since the filmmakers want to play off the “true story” aspect, and the film centers around the priest’s desire not to defend himself in court but to “tell Emily Rose’s story,” it’s kind of a shame that the film digresses so far from the truth.

While American “Emily Rose” seems to suffer her medical condition or demonic possession for a few months, and dies after a single failed attempt at exorcism, the real case involves a young woman in Germany named Anneliese Michel, whose medical/mystical affliction lasted something like eight years and who was subjected to numerous exorcism rituals. There are a number of web sites telling her story, and while it’s hard to vouch for any particular online source, most of the tales I found agreed in all the particulars.

In flashing back to Emily’s haunting, the film provides a few good jolts. It never really answers the question of whether the haunting was real, which is a detriment because the camera work, intended to creep us out, so strongly suggests that characters are being stalked by something that the viewer feels like the film is making more promises than it ends up delivering. This and some moments of stunningly bad dialogue (“So much of what we shared was like a nightmare,” Emily’s chaste college boyfriend tells Linney, “but I wouldn’t give up a single minute. She woke me up to things …” and then I stopped bothering taking notes.). The filmmakers weren’t quite sure what they had here, and how to reconcile the horror plot with the legal plot, so you get a film with a lot of interesting pieces and decent performances that adds up to nothing much..