Intrepid Vatican investigator (the chronically gloomy Gabriel Byrne), field agent of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, is put on the case of a Pittsburgh hairstylist (a punkish Patricia Arquette) with puncture wounds in her wrists and lacerations on her back, and a subway surveillance video to corroborate her denials of self-infliction. So far, so reasonable -- but the objective scientist ("He can't decide whether he's a scientist or a priest") starts to put away his pen and notepad as soon as the victim identifies herself as a nonbeliever, an atheistic stigmatic. The scientist has never heard of such a thing -- and small wonder. This isn't exactly, as some would have it, an Exorcist for the Nineties or the next millennium or whenever. It is more exactly an Exorcist for the conspiracy-theory cult. The heroine is possessed not by a demon, but by the spirit of a recently deceased priest. And not just any priest, but the very priest who has uncovered and translated a long-lost gospel in Jesus's own words. The Vatican muckymucks, feeling a bit tight in the collar on hearing of its call for an internalized as opposed to institutionalized religion, will stop at nothing to suppress it. Rupert Wainwright, one of the steady parade of British music-video and television-ad directors routed to Hollywood, brings with him the standard kitbag of the rock-song illustrator: fluttering birds, shattered glass, candles, wind, rain, fire, slo-mo, dissolves, strobe light, bleached color, scorched color, monochrome color. Nothing new, everything trendy. And all of this "style," to call it by a nice name, expresses nothing so much as a lack of interest, lack of confidence, lack of faith, if you prefer, in the story material. That in no way is intended as a compliment to the filmmaker's taste. The true horror of the thing is in his vulgarity, his pretension, his self-indulgence. He hardly cares a tinker's damn -- the phrase has seldom been so apt -- about the Catholic Church. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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