Streaming Availability: Hulu
In 2006 a German movie called Requiem was released, directed by Hans-Christian Schmid. It is a serious drama film about a young woman, Michaela Klingler (Sandra Hüller) overcoming her stifling religious family to escape out into independence at the University of Tübingen. She finds friendship and explores her sexuality, all while fighting off a history of mental illness. Tragically Michaela's improvements are undone by the stress of her horrible uncaring mother (Imogen Kogge). When Michaela hysterically screams "let me go!!" is she barking at her imagined demons, her epileptic fits, or maybe the person she most wants to escape but never can?
Requiem is not a horror movie. It is a slow, moving, often beautiful period piece of 1975 youth culture. Hüller's performance is fantastic, very physical, her screams and contortions filling the space where spooky effects and scare strings would play if Requiem were a horror. With characters that are complex and multidimensional, Requiem feels really authentic to its period and Bavarian location. My favorite scene has nothing to do with demons. It shows Michaela finally feeling herself and her freedom and belonging to her generation, freely dancing on the floor. Faced with the impossibility of being the perfect "normal" person she can only be for brief periods, Michaela chooses the supernatural. There is more safety in a demonic explanation than an unfixable medical one. That choice is heartbreaking and disturbing.
Anyway, Requiem is a very good movie, underseen. There's some interesting queer reads you could make out of this material. You also might notice that we just did two thick paragraphs about a completely different movie than the one in the title here. That is because the 2005 American version, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is complete trash. I saw Emily Rose in theaters and had mixed feelings. I'm honestly surprised how much I hate Scott Derrickson's take on this material.
Both movies are about the real-life case of Anneliese Michel, a 23-year-old Bavarian young woman who died in 1976 after sixty-seven(!) failed exorcism attempts by her Catholic priest. She was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy as a teenager, but after years of failed treatment, she and her family became convinced she was possessed by at least six demons. These figures range from old classics like Lucifer, Belial, Cain, to a few more fantastic ones like Adolf Hitler. Those lurid details might cloud the actual facts, which is that Anneliese died of malnutrition after months of refusing food and drink. Her parents and her priests were all found guilty of negligent homicide, given mostly suspended sentences due to mitigating factors in German law.
Where Requiem wants to explore the psychology of this young woman and why she would choose martyrdom, The Exorcism of Emily Rose wants to look at the most lurid and exploitative version of this story. And it gets significantly worse by believing in the self-destructive delusions, even finding perverse religious power in them. It is an awful movie with bad ideas that is shameful given the context.
Both films choose to rename the protagonist and change details. Emily Rose chooses to have no authenticity of any kind by shifting the story to the 21st century United States. Not any particular part of America, mind you, it is all vague nothingness, sometimes rural, sometimes urban. Its version of Anneliese, Emily (Jennifer Carpenter, who deserves a better movie around her), is not the focus. We open in medias res on a grave older man in a black coat and hat walking into home, but this is not Father Merrin or any exorcist. Rather this is the coroner. Emily has already died, and the state has chosen to put her priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) on trial.
Thus this movie is really not interested in its title character besides using her in the rare scare scenes, instead this is a courtroom drama. Which rapidly transforms from being about negligence or mistreatment of an ill young woman, to effectively putting Santa Claus on trial. Moore's lawyer, Erin (Laura Linney), initially an agnostic, winds up building a case that by necessity has to prove the existence of God and demons. Seemingly by the end, she pulls that off.
This is a very conservative movie, so Erin's history of being a defense attorney is treated as wicked sinfulness, literally helping murderers go free to murder again. Her law practice (which strangely does most of its business out of a martini bar) might as well be in league with the devil. It is a cartoon vision of the justice system born out of right-wing fantasies.
Besides your own thoughts on what place mysticism should have in a court of law, the biggest problem with Emily Rose is how dull it is. This is the explicitly effects-driven spook show version of the story directed by Scott Derrickson, who thinks of himself as a genre pro. Yet the scares are all hidden away in flashbacks for Jennifer Carpenter's character, while the real plot action is set in a courtroom where nothing supernatural ever occurs. We get spectacular scenes of Carpenter's incredible physical performance. She is the movie, even more so because the CG ghouls are lousy and look terrible. They were able to save on the effects budget because Carpenter was flexible enough to pull off the contortions on camera. It is really impressive. Meanwhile, in the real movie, Laura Linney sometimes wakes up at 3:00 AM, feeling kinda scared, but she's always safe in the morning.
This is a bad screenplay already, characters have no depth, and it is full of unimpressive legal jabbing presided by a very credulous judge who allows anything in her courtroom. But it is all made worse by a monstrous vision of faith. Father Moore is not content to just beat the rap, he wants to prove that Emily was a saint, a Christ-like girl complete with stigmata, sacrificing herself to prove the existence of the supernatural in a court of law. I know "mysterious ways" and all that, but if God needed to prove he was real to the American justice system, he could just do that, he is God. Instead we have this awful cruel deity seemingly in alliance with demons in a vast complicated scheme to prove the miraculous with anti-miracles. We are shown proof that the demon Belial is real, so we are made to assume this means God is real. Evil must prove good. Not that the forces of light are all that pure since since they demand the death of an innocent girl because what, the ACLU was suing about Ten Commandments displays in Courtrooms in 2005? God's Not Dead, he's just an asshole.
We need to remember our context here. This is only a few decades after the Satanic Panic, where terrible injustices occurred because courtrooms were willing to believe in non-existent cults. The state operating in the realm of the supernatural has not ended well historically. Maybe Father Moore likes the witch hunts, I dunno. Besides let's remember what designs the "faith" crowd has on the legal system as a method of control over bodily autonomy. Scott Derrickson, truly, you can fuck right off with this shit.
I hate The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It is the worst movie of this month by far. I would rather have not covered this movie looking back at this review now. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a waste of an incredible performance to instead futz around with half-thought ideas of faith. And also exploit and degrade a young woman's tragedy. Requiem is a much better movie, but it sadly very obscure. The only version I could find last-minute was a poor-quality upload on Youtube with questionable subtitles. I bet The Asylum version of Anneliese Michel's story, Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes, a Paranormal Activity mockbuster, is better than the well-known Emily Rose. Jennifer Carpenter aside, we should forget this movie.
Next Time! [Mötley Crüe voice] "HOUSE! HOUSE! HOUSE! HOUSE OF THE DEVIL!!!"
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