UK Release Date: 25-02-2011
Starring: Anthony Hopkins Rutger Hauer
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Mikael Håfström
Country: US/UK/Spain/France

The Rite is old-fashioned fare. It doesn’t spend all its time wondering, like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, whether one man’s God, or more specifically Devil, is another man’s mental or physical brain illness. It toys with the idea like the absent fondling of a set of rosary beads soon cast aside. In The Rite we are presented with straight up, old-style supernatural fisticuffs between good and evil. There is a God and there is a Devil, and the prize is the soul of humanity. Humanist atheists need not attend unless for the purposes of knowingly ironic amusement or righteous outrage. The mind boggles as to just in what way the film is ‘based on true events’; in fact, one Father Gary Thomas, a trained exorcist, of Sacred Parish, Saratoga, California acted as an advisor. Thomas believes in the personification of evil.

In the film, Michael Kovak (Colin O’ Donoghue) does not. He is the sceptical seminarian and son of a mortician (Rutger Hauer in a cameo) who is sent to Rome to become an exorcist in a last gasp attempt by his superiors to recover his lost faith. Kovak is introduced to the curious eccentricities of Welsh priest Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins), a seasoned exorcist. While studying exorcism in Rome, Kovak also meets Angeline (Alice Braga) a journalist pursuing her own sceptical research on exorcism. Kovak’s faith (or rather his scepticism) is put to the ultimate test when his mentor’s exorcism on a demonically possessed young girl (made pregnant by her own father) fails with tragic consequences. If one looks for the logic of the why and wherefore, doubt and disillusion will quickly follow. Why does the Devil seem nearly always to pick on pubescent girls? The ultimate battleground of corruptibility? Ditto a Catholic Priest, although in light of events in recent years some of them have proved to be pushovers in that respect. The stone-cold certainty of Lucas is shaken; a Doubting Lucas rather than a Doubting Thomas, as it were. Doubt is an open door for the Devil. The Devil is in Lucas now and only complete belief on the part of Kovak can get him out.

Unlike many critics, I didn’t find that The Rite dragged in terms of pace; there was an implacable momentum to the film for its first two thirds leading up to the climax. Kovak’s loss and search for faith (tending to the embalmed physical shell of a parent on a mortician’s table will do that to you) was followed, rather than explored, competently enough. The film takes a turn when Anthony Hopkins enters to do his turn. Whenever Hopkins stars in anything supernatural, the common consensus is that he is just falling back on his Van Helsing act out of Coppola’s Dracula, straight from the Brian Blessed School of Acting: incongruously raucous and/or joyous shouting at every opportunity. Again, it is not a consensus that I buy into. In The Rite Hopkins has to compensate for a lack of sustained dramatic substance at the climax of the film. And, given his time on screen, there’s actually not that much raucous shouting. It is the director Mikael Håfström (1408) who has to take responsibility here; he put this piece together and Hopkins does his best with the scant substance supplied. The battle between good and evil at the film’s climax is not sufficiently intense, sustained or – let’s not forget this is after all a supernatural horror film – frightening enough.

Frankly, The Rite is not as bad as the flock-of-birds critical consensus has made it out to be. Any horror film he stars in is going to be possessed of the presence of Hannibal Lecter as far as Hopkins is concerned. And you know what? The director expects it. The audience expects it. And Hopkins duly delivers. It is not a presence that will ever be exorcised when Hopkins enters such genre realms. Don’t go and see it if you think that it can be. It would have to be renamed: Miracle in Hollywood. And as everyone now knows, or so we are increasingly told: there are no such things as miracles, souls, God, or the Devil. We are alone in the universe, then. But there are worse things you could do on a Godless Friday night than spend some time with Father Lucas, raucous shouting and all.