Review of The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) by Robb J — 01 Jan 2011

"I have my own demons to worry about.".

The Exorcism of Emily Rose is part court-room drama, part CGI shock scare horror - it fails to deliver anything worth remembering in either case. At the centre of the story is the question "Do angels and demons exist?" which fails to be answered in a botched ended. This film doesn't know whether it's aiming for the Friday night teen crowd or the seriously deranged religious nuts who believe every single word in the bible. The tone struck me as very strange, I don't belong to either of these crowds but that still didn't stop the film from making around $150 million world-wide so I guess it made perfect business sense to go this route!

Hokey religious talk is thrown together with genuinely boring horror-movie cliches to deliver a movie which lasts almost 2 hours & fades into absolute insignificance when compared to any 30 seconds of The Exorcist. Jennifer Carpenter, who played Emily Rose, went on to relative fame in the TV Series Dexter and puts in a decent performance alongside Tom Wilkinson, who played the priest at the centre of the Exorcism/Court Case - Father Moore. The direction is very conservative apart from one scene which uses a helmet-cam attached to Father Moore as his home is attacked by supernatural forces.