The Exorcism (REVIEW) | Projector | Russell Crowe can't save a (genuinely) cursed film
[Ad - Sponsored by Entertainment Earth] Russell Crowe is in another exorcism film - but he made this one before the other! - in a film about the making of a cursed film... which itself has had a cursed production, and shows.
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00:00This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, Russell Crowe is an actor possessed,
00:07and maybe not because he's acting in The Exorcism.
00:11["The Exorcism"]
00:27Troubled actor Anthony Miller, played by Russell Crowe, is about to star in a new Exorcism film
00:32called The Georgetown Project, while trying to repair the relationship with his daughter Lee,
00:36played by Ryan Simpkins, who is also working on the film as a production assistant.
00:40As filming begins, Anthony struggles with his performance,
00:43and gradually his behaviour starts to become more erratic and disturbing,
00:46or his personal demons resurfacing, or as the supernatural
00:50cross from the film he's working on to reality.
00:53The Exorcism has had a very rocky road to the screen.
00:56The film was originally shot under the title The Georgetown Project,
00:58which is the name of the film within the film, all the way back in 2019.
01:04That's right, this movie has been sat on the shelf for the best part of
01:07five years while they figured out what to do with it.
01:10The film was written by Joshua John Miller and M.A. Thornton, and Miller also directs the movie.
01:15They were the creators of The Final Girls itself, a meta-horror,
01:19if with Tysia for me, you're jumping into the slasher movie that her mother starred in.
01:24And that film is quite well regarded, I never caught up with it myself,
01:28but I know in horror circles it's quite popular, so they do have good pedigree.
01:32And the idea was that they were going to do reshoots,
01:35because they knew the film had problems, but of course that got delayed by COVID
01:40for a very long time.
01:42In fact, they only picked up for reshoots all the way in 2023.
01:47So several years after principal photography,
01:50they reconvened to shoot new footage for the movie,
01:53and I think the only reason why this is the case
01:56is that it appears to have been resurrected by the success of The Pope's Exorcist,
02:00which Russell Crowe actually went and made after this movie,
02:04but ended up getting released beforehand.
02:06But that made a surprising amount of money,
02:09so that meant that actually Russell Crowe in an exorcism movie did prove to be viable.
02:14Is there some way of salvaging this project?
02:18What ended up happening is that you now have this new movie
02:21explicitly trading on a film that Crowe did after he did this one.
02:26The poster looks strikingly similar to The Pope's Exorcist,
02:29to the point where several people think that I'm actually talking about the same movie
02:33and not a different one.
02:35They even have the same colour scheme,
02:37and even the new titling seems to evoke The Pope's Exorcist.
02:40Now we have The Exorcism, which is a far more generic and unspecific title.
02:46The end result is exactly what you'd expect it to be,
02:49and arguably ends up even more meta than originally intended.
02:53A troubled film about the making of a troubled film.
02:58As you might have noticed in the original title,
03:00this is explicitly a riff on The Exorcist,
03:02and I don't just mean in the usual way that most exorcism films are a retread of The Exorcist.
03:08I mean this is explicitly referencing the OG movie.
03:11Georgetown is a big giveaway to that.
03:14In fact, the original title of The Georgetown Project in-universe,
03:19it sounds like it's just a code name for it.
03:21In fact, there's an early scene where Anthony and his daughter are talking over the script,
03:26and they ask him,
03:27oh, so this is a remake of...
03:29Yep.
03:29But they can't say they're remaking The Exorcist explicitly,
03:32because for legal reasons, they can't.
03:35They don't have the rights to that movie.
03:38So there's a lot of wink-wink, nudge-nudge,
03:41you know what we mean,
03:42we're kind of remaking The Exorcist.
03:44There's enough specific details in, say,
03:47the way the house is designed that it evokes the movie,
03:50but is not crossing into legally dubious territory.
03:54But the fact that the characters are actually remaking The Exorcist in-universe,
03:58it ended up predicting Exorcist Believer,
04:01which shot after this movie did principal photography.
04:05It predates that,
04:07but in a weird way,
04:08it actually ends up predicting that movie's existence,
04:12and has several weird coincidences,
04:14like the fact that the girl in the movie within the movie
04:18is played by a black actor,
04:20just like one of the possessed girls in Exorcist Believer.
04:23That's very fittingly meta and mind-bending for a movie
04:26which, in its premise alone,
04:27is already very reminiscent of Wes Craven's New Nightmare
04:30or Shadow of the Vampire,
04:32films that present movie-making as its own kind of personal hell,
04:36because it's so hard to get a film made,
04:39as the exorcism will very much attest to.
04:41But they're also about the blurring between fantasy and reality,
04:45not quite knowing where the screen ends.
04:48And that's especially true in the case of New Nightmare,
04:50where they incorporated aspects of the actor's real lives into the movie.
04:55And the exorcism could do something interesting with its idea,
04:59using the kind of tropes of an exorcist movie
05:02as a way of exploring an actor's personal demons,
05:05their own personal problems.
05:08Unfortunately, though, the movie is so scattershot in its approach
05:13that it suffers from what I like to call metaphor failure.
05:16When you're constructing an allegory,
05:18it typically helps to try and make it specific,
05:20make it about a particular thing.
05:22That way, it can be easily read and understood by the audience.
05:26They know that this thing is really about that.
05:30Unfortunately, what the exorcism does
05:32is instead of making it about a particular demon,
05:35it uses the possession to encompass all of Anthony's demons.
05:40And that is simply far too much for the movie to deal with.
05:44So the primary one is his alcoholism.
05:47He's just come out of rehab.
05:49He's trying to rebuild his career after spending a decade
05:52essentially pissing it away most of the time.
05:56It's clear that at some point he was a big A-list actor
05:59and then he really fell off.
06:02But also, he's carrying a lot of personal guilt for the fact
06:05that in the time that he was drinking,
06:07he was an absent father for his daughter
06:11at the time where her mother was dying.
06:14And so he has a lot of repair work that he has to do with his daughter.
06:19He's trying to rebuild his life.
06:22And then he comes into this role and starts to become very nervous about it.
06:28It starts to consume him.
06:29And if it was just simply those two things,
06:32it would work reasonably well.
06:35But then, for some inexplicable reason,
06:38and I don't know if this is part of the film's added reshoot,
06:42but they also add an additional element
06:45in that Anthony was an altar boy as a child
06:49and he was abused in the church.
06:51So he's also carrying a lot of guilt about his faith.
06:55He used to go to mass.
06:56He still remembers the words, but he's lapsed.
07:00And I suppose if you try to psychoanalyse it,
07:02it makes sense in that what happened to him as a kid led into the drinking
07:06that led into the destruction of his personal and professional career.
07:10It makes sense like that.
07:12But as a metaphor, it's very convoluted
07:15because you spend most of the movie going,
07:16okay, is this about what happened with the drinking
07:19or is this about what happened to him as a child?
07:22The movie just conflates the two
07:24and instead, it just ends up being ill-disciplined and ill-focused.
07:29Unlike in The Pope Sexist, where Crowe was playing the role
07:31very campily, almost knowingly,
07:33in this film, he takes the part seriously.
07:36He's trying very hard to bring out the dramatic side of the material,
07:40especially as Anthony is being hectored by a domineering,
07:44often abusive director that is taking advantage of his personal trauma
07:48and trying to provoke him in order to get the truth out of his character.
07:53So Crowe starts out the movie as being the main character,
07:57but then over the course of it, as he becomes more and more possessed,
08:01he ends up actually being something of a peripheral figure
08:04that pops in and out of the narrative.
08:07He becomes somewhat lost.
08:09And so that means that there isn't really much
08:11that Crowe can really do with that character,
08:14especially as story-wise, the focus shifts more from Anthony to Lee.
08:19And I really liked Ryan Simpkins' performance as Lee.
08:21I think they do a great job characterizing someone
08:24that has grown up with their father being in the public eye,
08:27having all their struggles being well-publicized,
08:30and how difficult and demanding that can be
08:33on already the problems that are happening privately.
08:37The fact the movie shifts its main character from Anthony to Lee,
08:41in a better movie, that probably could have worked.
08:44But in this film, it just ends up adding another metaphor into the mix,
08:49because now we get a fourth reading in that, for Lee,
08:53it becomes like living with an addictive, abusive parent,
08:57especially as they believe at first
08:59that they are simply just reverting back to their alcoholism.
09:03And there's moments where Anthony, possessed,
09:06starts taunting them about it.
09:08You don't speak to your father like that.
09:11It just ends up cluttering the movie even further.
09:15And really, the movie perhaps should have been
09:17more tightly focused on Lee to begin with,
09:21rather than focusing on Anthony.
09:23The problem with the X-ism is that it can't really decide what its identity is,
09:26whether it's a meta-horror or a psychological drama,
09:29and it ends up really being neither, in terms of execution.
09:33One of the more interesting things about the movie
09:35is that Kevin Williamson is a producer on it,
09:37who was the writer of Scream,
09:39so we have yet another Wes Craven connection there.
09:43And the movie is definitely playing around with the idea of
09:46curse films, curse productions,
09:48as much the production of the X-ist itself,
09:51but it doesn't really know what angle it's actually trying to take it from.
09:55There are points in the movie where it almost seems to be
09:58playing around as a dark comedy.
10:00They're filming the possession scene within the movie
10:04with Chloe Blayley's Blake in full possession makeup,
10:08and Anthony is struggling to get the lines,
10:11and between takes, she actually goes over to him and says,
10:15which looks absolutely ridiculous,
10:17because she's in full demonic makeup with scratches down her face
10:21and contacts in her eyes.
10:23That's a funny image, but that's weirdly lacking elsewhere in the movie.
10:27If you're going to pick a tone, at least pick a consistent one.
10:32There's actually a moment where they're at a party for the production,
10:36and Adam Goldberg's director literally says,
10:39It's a horror movie, but underneath, it's a psychological drama.
10:44And you go, oh, that's a clever, playful wink,
10:47because he's talking about the movie they're making,
10:49but he's actually talking about the movie we're watching.
10:52Isn't that smart?
10:54And instead, it just comes across as really being quite smarmy,
10:58but at least it tells us what the filmmakers were intending for the material.
11:02But okay, let's take this as a drama about someone
11:04that finds themselves irredeemable,
11:06which is exactly what Adam Goldberg's director describes Anthony as.
11:11You are irredeemable.
11:13And then having to be pulled back from that brink
11:16that they actually are worthy of being saved.
11:19The problem is the horror and the drama work at cross purposes to each other.
11:24In fact, they often undermine each other,
11:28because the drama establishes this as being set in a real world,
11:31in our world.
11:33And the horror stuff is all cliches you've seen in movies.
11:36And the greatest example of this is a sequence
11:40where Anthony goes to the bottom floor of this house set
11:43and has a massive possessed episode in front of the entire crew.
11:48He is bending his spine backwards in a grotesque and CGI-assisted way.
11:54Everyone's screaming.
11:55The lights are flickering the entire time through very supernatural means.
12:00Then they cut out entirely and he's teleported over to the table
12:04and he's slamming his head repeatedly into it.
12:07And this spectacle, everyone in this moment should have immediately gone,
12:12oh my God, our main actor is literally possessed.
12:16It has become a real-life horror movie.
12:18Instead, what ends up happening is the director of the movie goes,
12:23oh yeah, he's having some troubles with his drinking.
12:26I'm sorry, what?
12:28No, no, no, no.
12:29And that is how the horror elements undermine the drama
12:33because it makes it completely implausible.
12:36And this doesn't help that there are several moments like this.
12:39There's one where Anthony falls backwards out of a several-story window
12:44and there's no explanation for how his character survived.
12:46The movie just cuts to black at that point
12:49and they're just expecting the audience to make their own explanation
12:51for how he managed to survive that.
12:53And one really has to feel sorry for the cast
12:55because they really are trying with the material.
12:57It's a bad film, but they're not giving bad performances in it.
13:00In fact, I think that David Hyde Pierce is fantastic in this movie.
13:04He gives perhaps the best performance in it
13:07as a priest who serves as an advisor to both the film itself
13:10and to Anthony's performance.
13:12And while most priests in horror films are usually quite apoplectic
13:16and screaming at the top of their lungs,
13:18Pierce actually decides to go quiet with it.
13:21He plays this priest as being quite thoughtful and contemplative
13:26and actually becomes someone that Lee can talk to,
13:30someone that she can actually confide in and give advice to her.
13:34And it's a quite gentle performance,
13:37an unusually quite sincere one as well.
13:41And I thought this character was perhaps the best example of it
13:45actually subverting a cliche.
13:47Unfortunately, the rest of the cast are dealing with roles
13:49that appear to have been severely truncated in post-production.
13:52Again, we'll get to that in a moment.
13:55For instance, Sam Worthington gets third billing in this movie
13:59and he plays an actor that is meant to be the sidekick
14:02to Anthony's priest within the film.
14:05And he's clearly eyeing the lead role,
14:08especially as Anthony starts to wobble in the role.
14:11He's this young up-and-coming actor.
14:13This character is set up fairly early on in the movie
14:17and then he disappears for a long stretch of it.
14:21He disappears for a very, very long time in this movie
14:24and then reappears at about the hour mark or so.
14:28And you know kind of where that's going very quickly.
14:31Worthington is stuck playing a role
14:33that very much is almost a borderline cameo in the released version.
14:38But even more so than that, you have Adrian Pastar
14:42who plays the pre-title kill in this movie.
14:44The opening sequence follows the actor
14:47that was cast as the priest before Anthony.
14:50And then of course, something supernatural
14:53ends up taking him out of the role and out of the rest of his life.
14:57And Pastar's role is so small
15:00that he literally dies before his screen credit appears.
15:05But as I keep saying, it's pretty clear the movie
15:07had major problems in the editing room.
15:11How major?
15:12I don't think I've seen a movie that looks this jumbled up
15:15and this barely releasable since The Snowman.
15:19Oh yeah, it genuinely reminded me of that.
15:23It's pretty clear there's footage that they shot for the movie
15:26and then cut out of it.
15:27Or there's footage that they meant to shoot and never got around to.
15:31And then there's footage that they shot, of course, much, much later
15:33that they've had to graft into the movie.
15:35And then there are scenes that appear to have been moved around and restructured.
15:41In fact, there are scenes that often cut to black very awkwardly
15:45with strange time jumps.
15:47And it's not entirely clear how much time has actually elapsed.
15:51It feels like the kind of movie that was cut apart in the editing room
15:55to try and restructure it and rearrange it into some form that actually worked.
16:01Trying to move scenes around and compensate for missing footage.
16:05And the result is just really messy.
16:09And then on top of that, you've got the ADR trying to work miracles.
16:15Like the fact that you've got new dialogue from characters
16:18that are clearly off screen or not looking towards camera.
16:22They're so blatant about adding in new dialogue
16:25that at points they actually cut to close-ups that they shot previously.
16:30And they just put them over old dialogue.
16:33You can clearly see that the actors are saying
16:36completely different tail ends of lines to what's actually being heard.
16:42There's also elements that are very prominently introduced
16:44that don't have any kind of payoff in the released version.
16:47For example, early on in the movie, they're walking backstage
16:51and they encounter this very creepy life mask of Russell Crowe
16:54just sitting there on a table.
16:56Just this empty, lifeless, but lifelike face just staring back at them.
17:02And the camera lingers on this for ages.
17:06Just slowly going into this mask.
17:09It's an uneasy and unsettling image.
17:11And it's clearly something that we're meant to remember.
17:13It's setting up the idea that this is going to be used
17:16for a stunt double of some kind to replace him in a shot at some point.
17:20But then it never comes up again.
17:22It's just a creepy image in the final version of the movie
17:25that it never comes back to.
17:27And that struck me as very odd.
17:29And there are several things in the exorcism that feel like that.
17:33And this results in a movie that feels like it has gaping holes in logic.
17:37And it feels like the movie doesn't really know, again,
17:40what it's supposed to be doing.
17:41And it just makes for a very confusing
17:44and unintentionally disorientating experience for the viewer
17:47as they try to actually follow the story along.
17:51And then on top of this, you add in the reshoots
17:53which stick out like an absolute sore thumb.
17:56Especially because there's an early scene with Russell Crowe confessional
18:01that just seems wedged into the movie.
18:03There's no reason for him to be in a confessional at that point.
18:07And it's pretty evident that both Crowe and Simpkins in particular,
18:12they were shot completely separately.
18:14Their new footage, much of which goes into the film's new ending,
18:18Simpkins looks completely different to how they did in the rest of the movie.
18:22Which clearly signifies that this was not part of the original production.
18:27But Crowe, his new scenes appear to have taken place entirely
18:31in one confessional booth that they picked up later for the production.
18:35The credits show that there are Los Angeles and Australia units
18:39which suggests that they almost could have shot these reshoots on an iPhone, almost,
18:44if there wasn't so many credits on them.
18:47Because there's literally just a handful of pickup shots that anyone could have done.
18:52You just hire a church and Russell Crowe, get him for an afternoon,
18:56boom, you've got two new scenes for the movie.
18:58But all these attempts to try and patch up and salvage the movie,
19:02none of them address the core underlying issue in that for a horror movie,
19:06it's just not that scary.
19:08Despite the fact that it has all these super loud jump scares all throughout it,
19:13they really jack up the soundtrack in all the scare scenes.
19:17And that did catch me off guard.
19:19On occasion, there's a moment where Russell Crowe just jumps out
19:22from the side of the screen that really jolted me.
19:25And that wasn't because it was scary, it's because I was alarmed by the soundtrack.
19:30And it's a real shame the movie doesn't play more into this idea of a movie within a movie,
19:35trying to bleed in between worlds, you know,
19:38kind of playing off the fact that what's happening in the scenes is actually happening in reality.
19:42That's the fun part of a movie like this.
19:45You could really play around with this core conceit.
19:48And instead, the movie doesn't.
19:50Instead, it goes into the standard tropes for this kind of subgenre,
19:54especially by the time the ending rolls around,
19:56where it goes into deeply conventional territory.
19:59And largely loses the self-aware element,
20:02aside from the finale setting, which is a cold room set.
20:06Because if you don't know, the ending of the exorcist was shot on such a set.
20:10That's why the actors genuinely look like they're freezing and you can see their breath.
20:15It's because the set was refrigerated.
20:17So the exorcism pays homage to that by setting the ending,
20:21the exorcism, on one of these sets.
20:23But it doesn't lean into that enough.
20:26Instead, it just feels like you're watching the standard kind of exorcism
20:30that you'd see in all of these kind of movies.
20:34None of it particularly stands out.
20:36If you were hoping with all its production problems that the exorcism would be so bad it's good,
20:41it's not.
20:42It's just bad.
20:43It's a curiously flat and inert film.
20:46And it's very easy to see why it was shelved for so long.
20:50It just simply doesn't work.
20:52It's a potentially promising idea.
20:54You could do something clever with this.
20:57But the execution of it just fails.
21:00There are good performances that are trapped in this movie.
21:03But it's abundantly clear that this was pulled from pillar to post.
21:08Especially in terms of its post-production.
21:11But honestly, the problem started with the script.
21:14Because they didn't know how to approach the material.
21:17And by the time they finished the movie, they still didn't know what they were doing with it.
21:22It looks like it was cobbled together to make 90 minutes.
21:26And if you're the kind of person that enjoys analysing and deconstructing movies,
21:30especially ones like this,
21:32to see what they were originally like and to try and figure out what decisions were made
21:37to try and change things and fix things, allegedly,
21:41you might have some interest in the exorcism.
21:45But for most viewers, unfortunately,
21:48it just ends up being something that is largely irredeemable.
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