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THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
Rating: 
USA. 2005.
Director – Scott Derrickson, Screenplay – Scott Derrickson & Paul Harris Boardman, Producers – Paul Harris Boardman, Beau Flynn, Gary Lucchesi, Tom Rosenberg & Tripp Vinson, Photography – Tom Stern, Music – Christopher Young, Visual Effects Supervisor – Michael Shelton, Makeup Effects Supervisor – Keith Vanderlaan, Makeup Effects – Keith Vanderlaan’s Captive Audience, Production Design – David Brisbin. Production Company – Screen Gems/Lakeshore Entertainment/Firm Films.
Cast:
Laura Linney (Erin Bruner), Tom Wilkinson (Father Richard Moore), Campbell Scott (Ethan Thomas), Jennifer Carpenter (Emily Rose), Colm Feore (Karl Gunderson), Kenneth Welsh (Dr Mueller), Duncan Fraser (Dr Greg Cartwright), Henry Czerny (Dr Briggs), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Dr Adani), Mary Beth Hurt (Judge Brewster), Marilyn Norry (Maria Rose), Joshua Close (Jason), Andrew Wheeler (Nathaniel Rose)
Plot: Rising young defence attorney Erin Bruner is assigned the case of Father Richard Moore, a Catholic priest charged with the murder of 19-year-old Emily Rose. Moore’s defence is that he was performing an exorcism. As the case gets underway, the story comes out of how Emily became possessed while at university and how the manifestations became increasingly more sinister. During the course of the trial, the prosecution wheels out many doctors to insist that Emily suffered from seizures and epilepsy, but Erin proceeds to demolish their arguments. As the trial continues, Erin, despite being an atheist, starts to come to believe in the dark forces that Moore says are surrounding them and are trying to influence the outcome of the trial.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a sleeper box-office hit when it came out and proved a considerable success, despite being made on only a slim ($20 million) budget. The success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose was all due to a canny marketing campaign that convinced audiences that the film was based on a true story. Marketing campaigns placed broadsheet size flyers in theatre foyers that were mocked up to look like a articles reprinted from newspapers and cited the number of exorcisms conducted and sanctioned by the Catholic Church, as well as a trailer that made much of the audio recordings of the exorcism. It is almost certainly this ‘Based on a True Story’ claim and the canny advertising campaign that helped The Exorcism of Emily Rose become a box-office hit.
Alas when seen, The Exorcism of Emily Rose emerges as a thorough disappointment. The ‘Based on a True Story’ claim soon proves to be totally bogus. Well, not entirely so. The film is based on a true-life incident – the story of Anneliese Michel of Wurzburg, Germany who was killed in 1976 during an exorcism. The two Catholic priests and Anneliese’s parents were convicted of manslaughter over failing to feed her and being negligent in seeking medical treatment during the course of the exorcism. A series of tape recordings made of the exorcism, which consisted of rituals sometimes twice daily for nearly a year, proved instrumental evidence in the court case. And during the trial, it was argued by experts that all that Anneliese Michel suffered from was Grand Mal seizures and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.
On these matters The Exorcism of Emily Rose adheres to the basic facts of Anneliese Michel’s case. But on a great many others the film differs widely to the point that it calling itself based on a true story is something that stretches such a definition to snapping point. There does really seem something quite dishonest about Emily Rose’s claim to being based on a true story. For one, the film uplifts the trial from Germany in 1978 and transplants it to rural USA in 2005. That Emily Rose is claiming to be telling a true story and yet seems so unconcerned with the essential facts that it doesn’t even blink twice about changing the names, the entire country and adding 27 years onto the time period, surely says all that it really needs to about how credible and accurate a depiction of the facts that we can regard it as being. Certainly The Exorcist (1973), which has a great many similarities to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was also said to be based on a true story that William Peter Blatty admitted he only used as a springboard to telling his own story, but crucially this true story aspect was not the focus of a promotional campaign as it is in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Taking a true story as inspiration is one thing, but widely differing from the facts and then trying to sell the story as true is surely blatant falsification.
The more one looks at the details of the Anneliese Michel trial there seems more and more of a fundamental dishonesty in the subtly different spin that The Exorcism of Emily Rose puts on its telling of the story. For one, Anneliese Michel was known to be suffering from epileptic seizures, while Emily Rose fabricates an ambiguity that suggests these were explanations applied by doctors who were so arrogant that they could not admit the possibility of a spiritual dimension to the human mind. The film is in no doubt about the actuality of Emily Rose’s possession; the trial however was not so certain. Certainly Anneliese Michel manifested voices and mouthed obscenities, but it wasn’t until not long after The Exorcist came out that people began to take the idea of possession seriously as an explanation. (Also, while Anneliese Michel mouthed obscenities and degraded herself, there were no reports of psychokinetic phenomena). What is also not mentioned in the film was how the priests believed that Anneliese Michel was possessed by everybody from The Devil, Cain and Judas to Nero and Adolf Hitler, which seems so preposterous that it really says all there is about the naiveté of the exorcists.
The most damning difference between Emily Rose and the Anneliese Michel trial through is the outcome. While Emily Rose ends with the priest found guilty but in a bizarre feelgood turnaround being let off by the jury, the Anneliese Michel trial ended with the priests and parents convicted to jail where their naiveté was seen by the court as the direct cause of Anneleise’s neglect. More so, the court specifically stated that much of the so-called possessed behaviour was something that had been indoctrinated by the priests’ superstitions. This was later backed up by a commission of investigation from the Catholic Church, which issued a decree that denied that Anneliese Michel was ever demonically possessed. Given this, ie if there was no spiritual reality to what happened, it seems that all one really has is an extraordinarily cruel series of abuses by a group of superstitious people (the rituals were such that Anneliese Michel’s knees ruptured from the 600 daily genuflections she was required to carry out). There are however many people who insisted that the incident was genuine and her grave became a shrine, even though an exhumation in 1999 showed that Anneleise’s body had decayed normally and was not preserved as many believed. In that the real case ended with a denial of anything happening from both the court and the church, this surely places the film, and its insistence that everything was real, in the same arena as the naive family members and devotees at the grave site in believing that something did happen in contravention of the substantial facts to the contrary.
When it comes down to it, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a believer’s film. It surely belongs in the same camp as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). It is skewed towards a certain and absolute faith in the correctness of the position of the Catholic Church; it is derisive of any efforts to dismiss spiritual matters psychologically or rationally; in fact it is not even really interested in establishing the facts of the trial – all the dramatizations of what is going on come only on the side of the defence’s case, never on the side of the prosecution. (Indeed a substantial part of the Emily Rose’s promotional push came in marketing the film to the same new Christian niche market that had emerged as a result of The Passion of the Christ, with director Scott Derrickson even coming out of the closet as a committed Christian believer). A much more interesting version of the film would have constructed it as a Rashomon (1950) of sorts, or maybe like the recent Wonderland (2003), alternating the prosecution’s claim in spiritual actuality versus a version of events that showed them in purely mundane terms. In the end, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a film that has already made its audience’s mind up for it as to what really happened.
Even aside from that, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a dull film. It plays like a tv movie version of The Exorcist. Even as a courtroom drama, it is deadly dull – courtroom drama films and tv shows hinge upon the provision of twists, doubts or surprises, where here the only story arc comes in convincing the jury what is already shown to the audience. The film is directed by Scott Derrickson who is a genre dabbler, having previously written Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) and Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty (2004) and directed one other film, Hellraiser: Inferno (2000). Derrickson at least displays a slick technical competence.
But The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a dull disappointment. The one thing that a film claiming to be a true account of a demonic possession and exorcism might have brought is a fresh approach to its theme. Alas there is nothing in The Exorcism of Emily Rose that is not a cliché that had been borrowed straight from The Exorcist – be it the voices, the telekinetic activity, the obscenities, the body contortions. The film cannot help but feel entirely derivative. The rest is just tired and tepid pop-up scares – people with hollow eyes bleeding black liquid, sinister dark figures, mysterious people that end up being supernaturally killed just as they try to offer helpful information, Emily being swallowed up by her bed – conducted with a complete lack of any inventiveness.
Scott Derrickson has subsequently been announced as director of a number of projects including a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and an adaptation of the classic Paradise Lost about Satan’s rebellion against heaven.
A much more accurate and evenly balanced telling of the Annaliese Michel story came in the German-made film Requiem (2006).
Screening Courtesy of The 24 Hour Movie Marathon (Wellington, NZ)
Copyright Richard Scheib 2005
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