*This article contains spoil alerts*
In my opinion, the horror movies released from 2019 to now have not been the greatest. As a passionate horror movie lover, the horror movie industry has not been doing us much justice. The Pope’s Exorcist was an amazing movie and shows how much creativity the industry has with graphics that they’re not fully grasping yet.
The Pope’s Exorcist is a film released on April 14, 2023. The movie was filmed in Dublin and Limerick, Ireland, and Rome, Italy. Some scenes were even filmed at Trinity College in Dublin. The film is inspired by a real-life figure, Gabriele Amorth, who’s performed more than 50,000 exorcisms, as well as true events.
Going into this movie I didn’t have high expectations, not only because it was an exorcist movie and the plots are all usually the same, but because of the quality of the recently released horror films. I’ve watched a lot of exorcist movies so going into this movie – especially because it came out this year – I was kind of scared it was going to be bad and I was going to hate it, despite how interesting the trailer looked.
The actors chosen for this movie were greatly picked and played their roles amazingly. My personal favorite was Henry, played by Peter DeSouza-Feighoney.
The film opens with a quote by Gabriele Amorth. “When we jeer at the Devil and tell ourselves that he does not exist, that is when he is happiest.” The movie goes into a scene at the beginning of Gabriele in Rome, Italy where he performs an exorcism on a young man. I got sad when I watched this part because he tells the demon to show him how powerful he is by possessing a pig; once the demon is in the pig Gabriele has someone kill the pig so that the demon can go back to hell. That part was so sad for me because they hurt the pig. The plot continues with the Pope sending his personal exorcist, Gabriele Amorth, to travel to Spain to help a young boy who’s been possessed by a powerful demon.
As the movie progresses, the young boy Henry’s family goes through with the priest trying to figure out how Henry got possessed and how to cast the demon out. The whole story of the demon and how the possession comes about, I think, was the best part of the movie for me. The amount of detail the production put into this movie is amazing. It gives the viewer all perspectives and doesn’t leave anyone on a cliffhanger, which I love. The movie ends by talking about Gabriele’s books and the day of his death. If you’re into those semi-scary movies that have a heavy plot this movie definitely takes the cake for that out of all the movies released this year.
