There is something especially Aussie about a small-budget independent local production finding its way into the modern trend for exorcism horror… by playing into the nation’s predominant fascination with true crime stories. This is based on the real-life death of Joan Vollmer, a 49-year-old Antwerp resident who died in January of 1993. She was being exorcised by her local congregation, with her husband Ralph being the one who instigated and took part in the proceedings, and she died during the attempt. Four of those involved, including Ralph, were charged with manslaughter but ultimately walked away with such a slap on the wrist that they and their congregation “clapped, sobbed and hugged each other at the news”, with Ralph himself saying that the magistrate’s finding was the will of God
This dramatisation, right from the off, has zero time for placating the mindset that allowed for such a death (and others) to occur. It opens with Lara (Georgia Eyers) and her husband Ron (Dan Ewing) in a psychiatrist’s office discussing the treatment plan of Lara, who at one point was institutionalised and has been exhibiting signs of schizophrenia. Ron is patriarchal smugness personified in this scene and just about everywhere else, repeatedly speaking for her and openly berating Lara’s doctor for feeding her poisons to try and fix her.
Ewing is an actor who seems to shine in anything, whether he’s the douchey bad guy in Love & Monsters, Mad Max as a Power Ranger in Power Rangers RPM, or trying to salvage a different kind of religious shitshow in Chasing Comets. But here, he is truly terrifying. He represents an approach to the genre that cuts deep, more so than any run-of-the-mill exorcism film has managed for a number of years by this point. One that strips away the assumed righteousness of the idea of expelling external demons from a human body, and instead replaces it with a chilling realism that shows what an exorcism really entails when it isn’t dressed up in Hollywood production values: Torture.
I went through a lot of this film with my fists firmly clenched because people who commit truly heinous acts under the guise of doing the right thing is one of the quickest ways to churn my stomach to a roiling boil. The film at large is as lacking in subtlety as most Christian films arguing from the exact opposite viewpoint, highlighting the local congregation as conspiracy theorists with deep resentment towards psychiatry and worrying about tap water infecting people with fluoride and mind control receivers. It would come across as silly if it weren’t for how down-to-earth the framing is, wielding every bit of its low-budget trappings to give some serious Hounds Of Love-esque suburban distress.
Even more so than Ron, it’s Tim Pocock as Daniel James King, the lead exorcist who is brought in to ‘save’ Lara, who ends up being the main source of terror in this. His ability to charismatically sway the believers around him is matched by an equal ruthlessness in his line of work, dehumanising Lara as part of the process and proceeding to put her through her own Hell under the pretence of protecting her. He’s the kind of monster that outclasses any number of prosthetics-sporting creature actors found in the likes of the Conjuring Universe because there’s something unshakeably real about this kind of person.
For context, there is a pastor who operates here in Australia by the name of Daniel Nalliah. He hasn’t been in the news for a few years now, so I can’t say for certain whether he’s as genuinely batshit as before, but suffice to say, he’s quite the character. He’s a theocrat who led the Rise Up Australia party on a platform of Christian nationalism, and the kind of guy who liked to claim that national disasters are the result of the gays getting married and other such bullhonk. He’s also a faith healer who claimed to have literally brought someone back from the dead through prayer.
It is remarkably silly just reading shit like this, one of the many instances that highlight the revolving clown car that is the political landscape of this country, but it’s another thing to see such notions played completely straight. To see a man throw his self-righteous weight around, inflict harm and trauma on the innocent, and then walk away with his head held high in the belief that he was just in doing so. The exorcism scenes here are as far removed from the sensationalism of the rest of the genre as it gets, using the backdrop of rural Victoria to many a moment that highlights the revolting core at the centre of this particular belief system. That Man is always in the right, that Woman needs to know her place, and that when one claims to speak for the almighty, no one person shall dare question it. Even if it ends in bloodshed. It reflects the shocking ending of Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, where the scalding hot showers of a women’s sanatorium are juxtaposed with witches being burnt at the stake, and invokes similar indictments about the cruel ways in which mental health and faith can intersect.
This is right up there with the most difficult films I’ve
sat through all year, and possibly over the last few. I spent a fair bit of it
seething in my seat at how royally fucked the mindset behind all of this is,
but I spent even more of it full of dread over those who were inflicted with
this first-hand. Its criticism of fundamentalist Christianity in its treatment
of those dealing with mental health crises is incredibly blunt from end to end,
but it’s grounded in enough (as much as it pains me to admit) identifiable
reality to make it still stick. Just as a horror film in its own
right, it is astoundingly effective. But as a potential response to the ubiquity of
Christian exorcism imagery in modern horror, it is both refreshing to see the
alternative and highly depressing to realise just how ingrained this kind of
shit is as ‘normal’ in popular culture.
Loved reading this! Amazing review 🙌🏽
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