The Exorcette
Prey for the Devil, then operating under The Devil's Light (it is, I think, an open question which of these is worse - I refuse to frame the question as which of them is "better") was filmed in the summer of 2020, more than two years before it ultimately came out. And it feels like a movie that was in the can for that long. Before being shoveled out by Lionsgate on 28 October 2022, very obviously on the logic that horror fans will swallow down anything as long as it's Halloween weekend, it had been assigned release dates in January 2021 and February 2022. And it feels like a movie that was built to come out in the dead zone of winter.
Putting it directly, Prey for the Devil is a dreadful experience even by the flagrantly mediocre standards of exorcism movies. Which is miserable enough, but it's even actually disappointing, since the film's director, Daniel Stamm, previously made 2010's The Last Exorcism, which isn't itself good, but it comes pretty close, especially by those same flagrantly mediocre standards, and would probably have even gotten there if not for pretty sizable plunge in quality in its final several minutes. Prey for the Devil, much like that film, is never worse than at the very end, including a penultimate shot that is, I say this with all due consideration, one of the absolute dumbest things I have ever witnessed in an exorcism movie. It feels like the sequel hook at the end of a superhero origin story. The difference between Stamm's two films is that Prey for the Devil isn't ruined by its final few minutes; it's also ruined by the 80-odd minutes preceding them. This is nowhere close to the relative heights of The Last Exorcism; it's much closer to The Devil Inside.
That includes the rather tedious and insistent way that the film is fixated on the Catholic Church. Which means nothing at all, I get it: exorcism movies are by definition Catholic, unless they are going to some weird lengths not to be, but there's a difference between "the plot hook technically assumes Catholicism" and "the characters are very necessarily, specifically, and actively Catholic", and that's different still from what we get here, an obsession with the internal mechanics of the Church that frequently threatens to drown out the actual story altogether. This is all the more bizarre since those mechanics are, in fact, made up for the movie; Prey for the Devil is basically fanfic about Church procedure, which I guess makes sense in the spirit of "in an infinite universe, all things are possible". But it's still real weird to watch, speaking as a lifelong non-Catholic.
The notion at the center of the film is that, in 2018, the Church decided to deal with the skyrocketing rate of requests for exorcisms by opening exorcist schools all around the world (this didn't happen; you still need to go the Vatican. However, in 2019, the Church did open up the exorcism school to members of other Christian denominations). The film takes place at one of these in Boston, which is being played by Sofia, Bulgaria, and the unabashed Old World vibe of the sprawling exorcism school and later the ancient-looking convent we briefly visit near the end of the film, make it hard to tell if the filmmakers ever ever actually seen Boston. Also, presuming the action takes place in one of 2020, 2021, or 2022 (and there's no given reason to assume otherwise), it's hard to square that 2018 founding date with the impression we get of decades-old records hiding in the school's basement archives. But these are second-order complaints, in a film with plenty of first-order problems.
The actual story centers around Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers, who appears to be the person you get when Florence Pugh's lawyers threaten you with a restraining order), an orphaned woman in her mid-20s; as we saw in the opening scene, her childhood was spent with a terrifying mother (Koyna Ruseva), prone to extraordinary fits of violence that sure did look like demonic possession, though Ann never made that connection until she was older, after her mother had died. It's enough to make her, in the present, a passionate True Believer in the reality of demonic possession, which is mildly embarrassing for everyone around her, what with official Church policy being that one should assume that "possession" is just mental illness until proven otherwise. As such, she's in mild conflict with some of the officials at the exorcism school, where she serves as nurse: Father Quinn (Colin Salmon), the instructor of the exorcism lectures, and Dr. Peters (Virginia Madsen), the psychologist whose job is to, as it were, play devil's advocate, insisting that everything is a mental disorder. But Ann's conviction is strong enough that she gets dispensation to sit in on Father Quinn's classes, despite it being simply ridiculous to imagine that a girl could be an exorcist. Still, she picks up a lot very quickly, and she grows convinced that one of the school's current patients, a ten-year-old girl named Natalie (Posy Taylor), is fully and truly possessed, and begins to insert herself into the attempt to exorcise her. And in so doing she begins to suspect that the creature inhabiting Natalie is one and the same as the demon who possessed her mother, and that in fact it only started attacking Natalie in the first place in order to get closer to Ann herself, who is apparently so saints-be-praised pure and holy that she'd be some kind of highly-valued prize in Hell. It's not clear, since that part gets forgotten about in short order.
But then, just about every part of Robert Zappia's screenplay feels pretty damn undercooked and half-forgotten even by the time it's presented. Is this going to be the story of one determined nun's attempts to conquer the sexism in the Church and become an exorcist? The story of how an abused girl grown into a traumatised woman will confront her symbolic demons by confronting her literal demon? The story of how Ann and sexy young Father Dante (Christian Navarro) become a pair of rogue exorcists and flirt with rather remarkable shameless for two people who have both taken vows of chastity? The story of how the exorcism school is a high-tech science lab that is also built onto a centuries-old religious building that somehow exists in Boston, Massachusetts? All of these and at least one other that would count as a terrible spoiler if I identified, but I don't see how it's possible to avoid predicting exactly what's going to happen the absolute first conceivable instant we're given the necessary data point to make such a prediction, if not earlier. And also none of these, since the film's attention span isn't remotely up to the task of keeping any of these plots going for more than the length of a scene.
Basically, if you can name a stale exorcism movie cliché, Prey for the Devil has found room for it somewhere, and it covers so many of these clichés in its tight 93-minute running time that it can't really find the time to stitch them together into a story. It's just rattling off ideas, and placing them all into this incongruous, over-conceived and poorly executed space, and forcing Byers to pull herself in four different directions in order to try and anchor it all in a character study of a woman of extreme faith who more or less just keeps being right, since the one exorcism movie cliché that the film didn't see fit to pull in is the self-doubting priest, one of the most dramatically productive of those clichés. Stamm's direction is entirely free of anything interesting or atmospheric or even particularly scary; he telegraphs the hell out of his jump scares and otherwise mostly just frames this as one tedious pandemic-mandated medium single after another. The best we can say of Prey for the Devil is that it is never incompetent, but it is still extremely stupid, predictable, and devoid of any sort of consistent narrative momentum as it lurches from one boilerplate incident to the next.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Putting it directly, Prey for the Devil is a dreadful experience even by the flagrantly mediocre standards of exorcism movies. Which is miserable enough, but it's even actually disappointing, since the film's director, Daniel Stamm, previously made 2010's The Last Exorcism, which isn't itself good, but it comes pretty close, especially by those same flagrantly mediocre standards, and would probably have even gotten there if not for pretty sizable plunge in quality in its final several minutes. Prey for the Devil, much like that film, is never worse than at the very end, including a penultimate shot that is, I say this with all due consideration, one of the absolute dumbest things I have ever witnessed in an exorcism movie. It feels like the sequel hook at the end of a superhero origin story. The difference between Stamm's two films is that Prey for the Devil isn't ruined by its final few minutes; it's also ruined by the 80-odd minutes preceding them. This is nowhere close to the relative heights of The Last Exorcism; it's much closer to The Devil Inside.
That includes the rather tedious and insistent way that the film is fixated on the Catholic Church. Which means nothing at all, I get it: exorcism movies are by definition Catholic, unless they are going to some weird lengths not to be, but there's a difference between "the plot hook technically assumes Catholicism" and "the characters are very necessarily, specifically, and actively Catholic", and that's different still from what we get here, an obsession with the internal mechanics of the Church that frequently threatens to drown out the actual story altogether. This is all the more bizarre since those mechanics are, in fact, made up for the movie; Prey for the Devil is basically fanfic about Church procedure, which I guess makes sense in the spirit of "in an infinite universe, all things are possible". But it's still real weird to watch, speaking as a lifelong non-Catholic.
The notion at the center of the film is that, in 2018, the Church decided to deal with the skyrocketing rate of requests for exorcisms by opening exorcist schools all around the world (this didn't happen; you still need to go the Vatican. However, in 2019, the Church did open up the exorcism school to members of other Christian denominations). The film takes place at one of these in Boston, which is being played by Sofia, Bulgaria, and the unabashed Old World vibe of the sprawling exorcism school and later the ancient-looking convent we briefly visit near the end of the film, make it hard to tell if the filmmakers ever ever actually seen Boston. Also, presuming the action takes place in one of 2020, 2021, or 2022 (and there's no given reason to assume otherwise), it's hard to square that 2018 founding date with the impression we get of decades-old records hiding in the school's basement archives. But these are second-order complaints, in a film with plenty of first-order problems.
The actual story centers around Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers, who appears to be the person you get when Florence Pugh's lawyers threaten you with a restraining order), an orphaned woman in her mid-20s; as we saw in the opening scene, her childhood was spent with a terrifying mother (Koyna Ruseva), prone to extraordinary fits of violence that sure did look like demonic possession, though Ann never made that connection until she was older, after her mother had died. It's enough to make her, in the present, a passionate True Believer in the reality of demonic possession, which is mildly embarrassing for everyone around her, what with official Church policy being that one should assume that "possession" is just mental illness until proven otherwise. As such, she's in mild conflict with some of the officials at the exorcism school, where she serves as nurse: Father Quinn (Colin Salmon), the instructor of the exorcism lectures, and Dr. Peters (Virginia Madsen), the psychologist whose job is to, as it were, play devil's advocate, insisting that everything is a mental disorder. But Ann's conviction is strong enough that she gets dispensation to sit in on Father Quinn's classes, despite it being simply ridiculous to imagine that a girl could be an exorcist. Still, she picks up a lot very quickly, and she grows convinced that one of the school's current patients, a ten-year-old girl named Natalie (Posy Taylor), is fully and truly possessed, and begins to insert herself into the attempt to exorcise her. And in so doing she begins to suspect that the creature inhabiting Natalie is one and the same as the demon who possessed her mother, and that in fact it only started attacking Natalie in the first place in order to get closer to Ann herself, who is apparently so saints-be-praised pure and holy that she'd be some kind of highly-valued prize in Hell. It's not clear, since that part gets forgotten about in short order.
But then, just about every part of Robert Zappia's screenplay feels pretty damn undercooked and half-forgotten even by the time it's presented. Is this going to be the story of one determined nun's attempts to conquer the sexism in the Church and become an exorcist? The story of how an abused girl grown into a traumatised woman will confront her symbolic demons by confronting her literal demon? The story of how Ann and sexy young Father Dante (Christian Navarro) become a pair of rogue exorcists and flirt with rather remarkable shameless for two people who have both taken vows of chastity? The story of how the exorcism school is a high-tech science lab that is also built onto a centuries-old religious building that somehow exists in Boston, Massachusetts? All of these and at least one other that would count as a terrible spoiler if I identified, but I don't see how it's possible to avoid predicting exactly what's going to happen the absolute first conceivable instant we're given the necessary data point to make such a prediction, if not earlier. And also none of these, since the film's attention span isn't remotely up to the task of keeping any of these plots going for more than the length of a scene.
Basically, if you can name a stale exorcism movie cliché, Prey for the Devil has found room for it somewhere, and it covers so many of these clichés in its tight 93-minute running time that it can't really find the time to stitch them together into a story. It's just rattling off ideas, and placing them all into this incongruous, over-conceived and poorly executed space, and forcing Byers to pull herself in four different directions in order to try and anchor it all in a character study of a woman of extreme faith who more or less just keeps being right, since the one exorcism movie cliché that the film didn't see fit to pull in is the self-doubting priest, one of the most dramatically productive of those clichés. Stamm's direction is entirely free of anything interesting or atmospheric or even particularly scary; he telegraphs the hell out of his jump scares and otherwise mostly just frames this as one tedious pandemic-mandated medium single after another. The best we can say of Prey for the Devil is that it is never incompetent, but it is still extremely stupid, predictable, and devoid of any sort of consistent narrative momentum as it lurches from one boilerplate incident to the next.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: crimes against art, exorcising, horror
