Review: The Last Exorcism
When it comes to contemporary scary tales, most films resort to fantastic gorefests and extremism to provoke reactions from the audience. Thankfully, The Last Exorcism rarely resorts to such cliched convention.
Shot in documentary style, the subject is Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a reforming evangelist who's out to prove how believers can be convinced that demonic possessions and exorcisms are faked to exploit them. Cotton is arrogantly charming, fully aware of his power to persuade, and how that factors into his ability to hoodwink the faithful. When he randomly selects a request to perform an exorcism to expose the trickery behind them, he and the documentary crew are off to rural Louisiana to answer a desperate farmer's pleas. Unfortunately for Cotton, he is asked by a desperate father to perform an exorcism he never wants to do; one on a child.
The acting in The Last Exorcism is outstanding, starting with Fabian (Big Love) as Cotton, whose glee at revealing his tricks could have been annoying, if it wasn't clear his goal is to help people. Ashley Bell, Caleb Landry Jones and Louis Herthum as the Sweetzers all seem straight off the farm, with homespun earnestness and love for their family that expresses itself in different ways for each character.
Most of the film is a battle between superstition and reason, much like the paradox of the faith of the devout being the very reason their trust is used against them. Cotton gleefully debunks the process, and manipulates the family into doing his bidding. Even when the situation gets out of hand, Cotton still tries to force his will. There's very little of conventional horror in the film; instead director Daniel Stamm relies on the tension of reality versus delusion throughout most of the film.
Unfortunately, The Last Exorcism doesn't consistently keep up its unconventional style and eventually succumbs to 70s cliches. For nearly the entire movie, The Last Exorcism is riveting, constantly grooming the audience to look for deceptions, and to question everything on screen, making it a rare film that trusts its audience's intelligence. It's particularly frustrating because it manages to stay within the horror genre without resorting to tricks that drag the film down, and completely change the mood. The change in tone is so abrupt it diminishes the overall impact of the story, and feels like it was tacked on to a film that otherwise wasn't clearly horror just to give it a genre designation. Yet The Last Exorcism cannot be dismissed as a failure because even with the sudden detour, it's still superior to most films intended to frighten.
The Last Exorcism is one of those rare, near-brilliant films that is going to keep film fans talking for a long time after viewing.
Austin connections: All the principal filmmakers are have brought films to SXSW. Director Daniel Stamm directed A Necessary Death, one of the most anticipated films of SXSW 2008. Producer Eli Roth's Cabin Fever was at SXSW in 2002, and screenwriters Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland's Mail Order Wife played SXSW 2004. The Last Exorcism itself was originally scheduled to play SXSW 2010 under the title Cotton, but was pulled almost immediately after a distribution deal was announced.