Exorcismus | La posesión de Emma Evans [ Movie Review ] **

Exorcismus is about The Possession of Emma Evans. A teenage girl who happens to have an uncle who is a priest. The same priest who happened to fall from grace recently due to a failed exorcism. When Emma Evans started to show signs of possessions, who are you going to call?

It's not hard to figure out who going to help exorcise Emma's unholy squatter.  But it took so long to get there as Exorcismus had to wrestle with Emma's adolescent angst. When things finally became too much for Emma to ignore, she finally turned to her uncle and together, they discovered that there's supernatural force at work here.

Strangely, Emma was left on her own to convince her skeptic parents about her plight and the need for exorcism. Expectedly, her parents turned her request down and the runtime gets padded even longer. It made one wonder why don't they just left the parents see how a holy cross could fly across the room when it was place on Emma's hand. No sane parents would think that it's a medical condition after witnessing that kind of phenomena. It just felt like an unnecessary to drag of screen time until the inevitable happens.

But that's not the worst bit. When we reached the exorcism bit, it felt like a series of dental extractions with plenty of breaks in between. The exorcism just didn't seemed like it's such a big deal here. There are painful attempts to extract the devil but in between extractions, the victim was allowed to roam freely and basically left on her own with minimum supervision. Not quite your usual exorcism movies where the possessed individual would be either tied up or confined in one room till the devil's been extracted. There's no sense of urgency and needless to say, the possessed Emma went out to cause more grief and mayhem. Kinda hard to feel sympathetic for Emma's latest victims when the characters in the movie don't even seemed to care.

The better parts of this movie would be the twist at the climatic finale when the truth behind this possession was finally revealed. It managed to achieved an innovative twist to this tired genre. It did helped to explain some of the loopholes that were found in the main bulk of the movie but then again, the explanation does not really cover the weakness of the scripting. The problem with this  "shocking" revelation turned out to be just another silly adolescent tantrum gone too far. That took the shine off the innovative twist to the game and that's the only saving grace of this movie.

There are plenty of exorcism movies around and even though the formula been well defined, there are some good ones around and some not so good. The Exorcist is the classic that no other exorcism movie could touch. The Exorcism of Emily Rose / Requiem were quite good and Exorcismus would come in at the spectrum of "not so good". Weak plotting and zero on fright made this movie felt like a telemovie that could not be channel surfed.