Young nun Ann, raised with the trauma of a mentally ill mother, is trained in exorcism by Father Quinn. Able to enter into a relationship with the possessed admitted to a hospital run by the Church, Ann focuses on the liberation of Natalie, a victim of the same demon that years before her had perhaps possessed her mother. While attending classes with other priests, Ann begins to have disturbing childhood memories and terrifying visions, as well as violently clashing with Natalie’s demon. After a successful exorcism, however followed by the woman’s inexplicable suicide, Ann decides to abandon her new profession: but the awakening of Natalie’s case forces her to continue and to discover a shocking truth about her past and about a possession that he will see her more involved than she thought…
It must be difficult for writers of horror films not to give in to the temptation of the obvious, that is to go fishing somewhere that is not the usual visual and narrative paraphernalia of the genre, especially in the case of films about demonic possession.
Basically, fifty years after The Exorcist we can say that we have never moved away from there, from the intuitions and inventions that that film imposed with a force and violence never seen at the time: still priests against demons (at most are the nuns, but nothing changes), still possessed girls who climb walls, still traumas that are reflected on those who should practice exorcism and find themselves entangled in faults that the demon amplifies and sends back… And of masterpieces, of course, not even the shadow, especially if films like The Devil’s Eyes arrive as a copy of a copy of a copy (of a copy of a copy…) of other films already in turn derivation of consolidated models, and therefore repetitions neither tired nor weak, but completely useless and careless, of stereotypes so consolidated as to go unnoticed by now.
In short, you don’t need to be a fan or even an expert in horror (a category very popular with both audiences and film critics) to realize that Daniel Stamm’s film (a vague specialist in the genre, after the not without interest mockumentary The Last Exorcism , the terrible 13 sins and the direction of series such as Into the Dark and Loro) is a product without new ideas (except perhaps that of the hair that suffocates the little girl, which ended up on the film poster not surprisingly) and without images with which to represent those old, which also exist and are many.
The possession of the exorcist himself is also part of the tradition of the genre, to reaffirm the ambiguity of the figure of him and of the very institution for which he works (the Church), whose psychological violence is equal to the blasphemous and destructive force of the demon.