Deliver Us From Evil

Scott Derrickson's Deliver Us From Evil is one of the darkest movies I have ever seen, and no, I am not talking about the tone of the film.  I am talking about how a majority of the movie is shown in as low or as little light as possible.  Even when the characters are outside, it is either overcast or raining.  When the sun makes a rare appearance, it seems as strange to the audience as the supernatural happenings that go on within the story.

To be fair, there is an explanation as to why the movie is lit so dimly.  The city of New York is under attack by demons, you see, and those pesky creatures of the night don't like light.  You can always tell when one is around, because all the lights in the room will flicker and die out all at once.  Another sign that demons are near is that Jim Morrison music will suddenly start playing from somewhere.  I don't think I quite got the connection there.  Perhaps Satan's just a big fan?  Regardless, I know the real reason why the movie is so dark and hard to see - It's so it can have things jump out in front of the camera without us noticing.  This movie must have some kind of record when it comes to jump scares.  During the two hours or so it runs, the main characters are jumped by bears, lions, cats, a dog, a few bloated corpses, a scary disembodied face, and an antique Jack in the Box toy.  You know you're in a lazy thriller when the only source of excitement is having things jump out at you.  You know you're in an especially lazy thriller when it has things jump out at you multiple times in less than five minutes.

The movie claims to be "inspired by the true story" of Ralph Sarchie, a New York cop who quit his job so he could study demons.  In real life, the guy always had an interest in the paranormal, and his life led him away from the force and into the world of spiritual investigations.  He's even worked alongside Ed and Lorraine Warren, the couple who were the inspiration for last summer's The Conjuring.  In the movie, Ralph (played by Eric Bana) is your standard tough guy New York hero cop, who has a wise-cracking partner (Joel McHale).  Ralph and his partner are investigating a series of grisly murders, which include a dead body being found in somebody's basement, and a woman visiting a zoo with her young son, only to have her throw the kid over the fence and into the lion pit.  When the cops find her, she is incoherent, and won't stop rambling the lyrics to a Doors song.   The deeper Ralph digs into learning the connection between these murders, he begins to suspect that there is something supernatural at work.  He also starts seeing things and hearing voices that apparently nobody else can.

Cue the disembodied sound of children's mocking laughter, doors closing by themselves, and abandoned pianos that slowly and ominously play out nursery rhyme music by themselves.  Also cue the world-weary priest named Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez), who warns Ralph that he is about to enter a world of "primary evil", which is different from "secondary evil", which is the evil that humans do to each other.  The Primary form of evil is demonic in nature, and can only be stopped with an exorcism.  We witness in a prologue that three American soldiers in Iraq back in 2010 entered a cave they weren't supposed to, and discovered "something evil" within.  When the soldiers were discharged, they brought the evil back with them.  What all of this means is that if Ralph wants to stop the person behind these murders, he's going to have to find religion and put his faith in God.  The movie inevitably ends with an exorcism scene, only this one occurs in a police station - one of those rare police stations where nobody seems to notice or care that a battle between Heaven and Hell is going on inside one of the interrogation rooms.

Like I said in my review of The Last Exorcism Part II, pretty much everything that can be done in an exorcism movie has been done.  Deliver Us From Evil does nothing we haven't seen before, and doesn't even do it very well.  It's the kind of movie that can't think of any way to scare us, so it just throws loud noises on the soundtrack constantly, and hopes we'll jump at least once.  I don't know about you, but I've had my fill of horror movies like that.  I'm also pretty much done with movies that end with somebody strapped to a chair or a bed, speaking in tongues, while someone stands over them and screams "Demon be gone!", or something to that effect.  Both of these kind of films have been done so frequently over the years that they have lost their effectiveness.  Instead of being put on the edge of my seat, I find myself struggling to pay attention.

The movie also never seems to have a good grasp on just who Ralph Sarchie is.  We know he's a real person, but the movie offers no real insights into who he may be.  Bana plays him as the street-smart, tough talking type, but surely there's gotta be more to the guy.  He does have a family back home, but his job keeps him distant from them.  They include a caring wife (Olivia Munn) and an angelic six-year-old daughter (Lulu Wilson), who is so sweet and innocent, she naturally becomes a target of the demons.  The family dynamic doesn't work in this story, because Ralph never seems to truly care about them.  Yes, I get it, his job forces him to be distant.  But there still has to be some kind of warmth, some scene that displays the love they do have for each other.  When his little daughter starts complaining of scratching sounds coming from the floorboards and her toys moving around on their own, Ralph doesn't even seem all that concerned, not even when he thinks he sees a demonic entity hovering ominously over his sleeping kid's bed.

Deliver Us From Evil manages to hold our attention for a little while, with a somewhat intriguing mix of police crime story and supernatural horror.  But, as the layers of the story are unraveled, we realize with disappointment that there is little to discover here and even less to care about.  I did do some research on Ralph Sarchie after seeing the movie, and it sounds like he has an interesting story.  Someone should make a movie about it some day.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

0 comments