Anthony Miller, an alcoholic actor who had regained his sobriety for several years, began a “ mea culpa “. This, as much in his personal life, with his daughter, Lee, who bitterly resents him, as in his professional life, in this case moribund. However, here is his career in the process of being resurrected when he lands the role of a priest who must exorcise a possessed teenager in the remake of a famous film that has never been named. The trouble is that Anthony seems to have taken the “method” of the game to the point of becoming possessed himself, much to Lee’s dismay. An exercise in intimate and complex meta-cinema, The Exorcism sees filmmaker Joshua John Miller pay tribute to his father, Jason Miller, who once starred in the masterpiece The Exorcist (The exorcist).
In this regard, if there is a telling line in The Exorcism, it’s the one where the character of the director who directs the film within the film declares: “It’s not really a horror film. It’s more of a drama disguised as a horror film. »
Certainly, the passage has satirical overtones, and the manipulative and pretentious inclinations of said character prove that, beyond all this pretense, Joshua John Miller does not take himself too seriously. The fact remains that there is truth in the said statement.
However, The Exorcism is not lacking in horrific elements, because it is indeed a “possession film”, but a possession film in both the literal and metaphorical senses. The filmmaker speaks, through the screenplay co-written with his work and life partner MA Fortin, about his father and the demons who inhabited him (figuratively).
However, Joshua John Miller also speaks about himself, this new film having served him, as he told us in an interview, to exorcise (figuratively, again) a previous traumatic professional experience linked to being a queer man at Hollywood.
Hence the decision to subvert the traditional pattern of the possession film and to infuse it with a queer dimension. Usually, a possessed child, adolescent or young woman is saved by a man of the Church. In The Exorcismit is Lee who, with the help of his girlfriend, Blake, saves Anthony.
More fascinating than scary
From this approach with multiple levels of reading emerges a film that is more fascinating than frightening. Normal, since Joshua John Miller seeks more to intrigue than to frighten.
However, given the title and the undeniable affiliation of The Exorcism In the possession film subgenre, a majority of people will expect thrills. There are some, but not that many. The interest, because there is interest, resides elsewhere: in the “meta” entanglements.
In The Exorcism in fact, everything or almost everything is a game of mirrors; everything or almost everything is put into abyss.
There is of course the work being filmed within the film, which is not a simple (meta)fiction, but the remake of one of the most famous productions in the history of cinema, with all that this entails of allusions, winks, reconstructions…
Then there is the protagonist, Anthony Miller, partly inspired by the actor and playwright Jason Miller (born John Anthony Miller), who himself suffered from alcoholism…
There is also the presence of Russell Crowe, which is, in itself, “connoted”: the actor plays an actor playing an exorcist priest, a year after having played the role of an exorcist priest in The Pope’s Exorcist (The Pope’s Exorcist), based on the alleged exploits of a real exorcist priest… Crowe who, early in his career, was notorious for his “method” approach to acting…
The more we scrutinize The Exorcism, from its structure to its thousand narrative details through the referenced profiles of its characters, and the more it is dizzying. Failing to make the hair stand up.