The Rite (2011)
Directed by Mikael Håfström
Seminary student Michael Kovak reluctantly attends exorcism school at the Vatican. While he’s in Rome, Michael meets an unorthodox priest who introduces him to the darker side of his faith, uncovering the devil’s reach even to one of the holiest places on Earth.
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If you you’ve seen The Exorcist (1973), you’ll know what to expect.
"The Exorcist" came out in 1972 and it's sad to say that it still stands as the best film on possession that Hollywood has turned out.
Michael Petroni and Matt Baglio's scenario falls about 500 miles short of The Exorcist, right in the crack between a sincere, bland religious drama and a monster fest.
I was a wee girl in Catholic school when The Exorcist was released, and the nuns stood before us with a stern admonishment: The Vatican — or just someone in a dress and a pointy hat — had decreed that watching this movie might actually cause viewers to become possessed by the devil.
And once again, we are reminded by a self-conscious film just how high William Friedkin 's " The Exorcist " set the bar for cinematic tales of Satan, his demons, and the human hosts who are victimized by them.
But really, how much more can you do since “The Exorcist” broke the mold in 1973?
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Rite” goes wrong with a guilty 4 – and don’t blame it on the winter doldrums because Hopkins’ Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs” was a February release.
Their face-off might remind you of the moment when FBI agent Clarice Starling first stepped to the glass prison cell containing Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs."
As this transition takes hold, it’s impossible not to liken Hopkins’ performance to everyone’s favorite psychopath from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Anthony Hopkins peaked with "The Silence of the Lambs" and since then his career has involved many a sidelong reference to it in lesser films, i.e. "Titus."
The main reason to watch The Rite would be to see Anthony Hopkins ( The Silence of the Lambs ) back in full Hannibal Lecter-style swing, chewing on his lines and salivating over his verbs, using his blocky body, beady eyes and naughty troll's smile to suggest terrifying menace.
Judging by The Rite’s promotional campaign, its backers are clearly pinning their box-office hopes on the idea that folks still want to see Hopkins get scary as hell, as he did to Oscar-winning effect in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs .
Finally, Kovak develops a pseudo-romantic relationship with a lovely, undercover journalist (Alice Braga, niece of Brazilian actress Sonia Braga of Kiss of the Spider Woman fame) out to expose "the truth" about exorcisms.
The final straw, though, is a climactic exorcism sequence so daffy and open to unintended audience mockery that it most closely resembles 1990's Leslie Nielsen/Linda Blair spoof "Repossessed."
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In this (and pretty much only this), it is similar to Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, that greatest of all films about Christianity.
Just before completing his priesthood he is sent to the Vatican where he meets Hopkins’ Lucas, whose house seems to have been designed and modelled on the doctor’s one in Universal’s Frankenstein (1931).
Widowed dad Istvan Kovak (Rutger Hauer, "The Hitcher") is uncomfortably pushy about the dead with the young boy, including the corpse of his own mother.
So it goes that Michael, looking a little like Anthony Perkins in "Psycho," heads off to priest college in Rome.
Inspired a true story, screenwriter Michael Petroni is quick to point out on a title card - to which I might reply, "As was Psycho " - The Rite opens big, with a young man we'll come to know as Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue) preps a dead body for funerary services.
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The granddaddy of the possession genre is, and will probably always be, "The Exorcist," but more recent examples, like 2000's underrated " Lost Souls ," 2005's astounding " The Exorcism of Emily Rose " and 2010's documentary-style " The Last Exorcism ," have also ably pulled their own weight.
Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom, who stuck John Cusack in a haunted hotel room with great results in "1408," does create his hoped-for spooky atmosphere in "The Rite."
Director Mikael Håfström has given us a number of uneven horror/psychological thrillers in the past: "Evil," "Derailed," and "1408."
The Rite , from 1408 director Mikael Håfström , is a supernatural thriller following seminary student Michael Kovak ( Colin O'Donoghue ) who is sent to the Vatican to study exorcism.
Håfström has worked in this kind of dubious material before: his last prominent feature was the limp haunted hotel piece 1408 , but that lacks the gaudiness which results from The Rite's inept juggling of two very different tonal registers.
As directed by Mikael Håfström ("1408," "Derailed"), the film appears to have had its own exorcism, with critical ideas and images suggested which are never followed through on.
In his effective version of Stephen King's 1408, Hafstrom got plenty of thrills from locking a skeptic in a spooky room, and here again he sets a portentous mood in scenes in which Hopkins is cloistered with one of the possessed.