When the sulking 15-year old Emma (Sophie Vavasseur) is subjected to strange, shaking seizures, her parents send her through all the physician-proscribed steps. The brain scan and other tests prove negative. Things get a little stranger when her psychiatrist dies of heart failure during a hypnosis session. But when she levitates two feet above the kitchen floor during one of her fits, her parents reluctantly call upon Emma's uncle, Father Christopher (Doug Bradley), a Roman Catholic priest disciplined by his diocese when a girl died after one of his exorcisms. Her parents don't believe in the devil, but their rational explanations fall silent before what they have seen.
Set in Britain, Exorcismus reiterates the genre classic The Exorcist with a Generation Y protagonist. Spanish director Manuel Carballo and writer David Munoz play well within the smart phone teenage world and the giddy anomie of a youth culture with little purpose beyond sex and drugs and whatever they're calling their music. There are twists. Emma is unhappy with the home school regimen imposed by her relentlessly secular, research physician mother. “When she's older, she'll thank us,” she tells her husband, a softer focused, humanities-oriented magazine editor. The mother seems to doubt whether evil is anything worse than low college application scores. But her brother Christopher, who seems tightly wound under his collar, has definite and forceful ideas on the subject. Could he be an example of how preoccupation with evil can nurture evil?
The marvelous thing about Exorcismus is the minimal SFX. Carballo does it mostly with acting, askew camera angles, blurry lenses and a sense of menace hovering over the silences. Much of the cinematography is artful and A-one.
