Silly fun, serious question

The Pope’s Exorcist ask viewers what is it to have faith in the face of true and terrifying inexplicable evil. Priest Yaroslav Walker reviews.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A priest holds a cross up in his hand in a chaotic environment while a colleague looks on

Father Amorth in action, played with commitment by Russell Crowe.

Sony Pictures.

It goes without saying that all contemporary films about demonic possession and exorcism are seen in the light of the great masterwork. 1973’s The Exorcist is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of what an exorcism film needs to have: believable characters, a strong script, proper pacing, and a genuine respect for the concept of the supernatural – all culminating in an opportunity for the viewer to wrestle with their faith. Exorcism films rise or fall by the metric this cinematic cornerstone inaugurated. I’m pleased to say that The Pope’s Exorcist does a reasonably decent job.

Let’s be clear: it’s silly fun, and a bit of candy-floss fluff, which allows Russell Crowe to launch an assault on yet another accent. Yet, sugary-sweet fun is no bad thing, and underneath the loving horror-genre-cliché surface, there is something of substance to consider. The plot is standard: afflicted family – Julia and her children Amy and Henry – arrive in Spain to oversee the restoration of an old Abbey Julia’s late-husband left the family. Boy is possessed. Boy cannot be saved by medical science, so the exorcist saves the day.

The performances are all committed, and you can tell the performers are having a great time, Crowe especially.

The possession is quick and effective with scenes suddenly cutting from the horrifying to sanitised medical procedures (an homage, I think, to the great original). Attempts to explain matters away scientifically are attempted and quickly abandoned, and the film is proudly unambiguous. The Holy Father knows of this Abbey, and its dark history, and personally tasks Crowe’s Amorth with uncovering the truth. The film’s pacing is excellent in the first half, and wastes little time in introducing the main players. The script is sharp and lean (for the most part), with minimal exposition, allowing details to emerge naturally. The performances are all committed, and you can tell the performers are having a great time, Crowe especially. The final third is tremendously silly and overblown, and probably could have been cut down dramatically, but one can forgive it its excess for the themes it raises.

Purportedly based on the autobiographical writing of the late Father Gabriel Amorth, sometime exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, The Pope’s Exorcist could be viewed as shifting the burden of the question posed by the 1973 classic (what does it mean to have faith in the face of true and terrifying inexplicable evil?) to the institutional level. It is 1987 and the winds of modernity are blowing hard. Amorth (Crowe) is a contradiction of a priest – he rides a Vespa scooter, jokes around with nuns, and demonstrates a relaxed attitude with those in authority, and yet his faith in God and his belief in the supernatural is solid. He works tirelessly in a world and a Church that balks at him: expecting rigidity and conformity in outward appearance, yet sceptically admonishing him for his belief. It could’ve just as easily been set in 2023. Such themes resonate in the context of a Western Church still struggling for self-definition in a modern world of which it is ‘in’ but never meant to be ‘of’.

The film is very much speaking into the moment. What is the supernatural, and does the Church even believe in it?

The question the film raise (whether it means to or not) is how will the Church see itself and its mission in the coming decades. Early on Amorth is admonished by an American cardinal who is intent on making the Church more ‘relevant’ to the modern sceptical generation. He sees little use for the office of exorcist, and seems to disregard the supernatural as fantasy. As Amorth investigates the possession he learns the dark truth of the Abbey and its role in the Spanish Inquisition. He is confronted with the pernicious persistence of sin – his sins, the sins of those around him, and the historic sins of the Church.

The film is very much speaking into the moment. What is the supernatural, and does the Church even believe in it? What is evil, and what does it mean for a man and for the Church to truly deal with sin? How can the Church speak into a world that does not believe, and yet is not equipped to confront the reality of evil?

As the film reaches its conclusion it becomes clear that the Enemy does not wish to simply possess a child, but wishes to possess the Church. Watching the film in view of the present struggles the faith faces – a struggle over the very definition of sin, evil, redemption, etc – one can read the demon as a stand-in for the Spirit of the Age. Whether it means to or not, The Pope’s Exorcist asks the viewer to genuinely tackle the question of who ought to direct the Church – contemporary mores or the eternal truth of Christ? The final scene gives a hopeful answer while also hinting at the possibility of sequels. It is camp, it is silly, but it affirms life, goodness, truth, and faith, and I wouldn’t say no to another outing for Crowe as Amorth.

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”