Film review – Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism

Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism

There are two films about the real-life case of Anneliese Michel, who died during an exorcism – The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which says she was possessed and exonerates the priest who performed the rite, and Requiem, which says she was mentally ill and the church were culpable in her death.  Guess which one most people have seen or heard of?  Since The Exorcist, dozens of films have gone over the same ground – innocent gets taken over by demon, fail to be helped by medical or psychiatric treatment, good guy pastor shows up to cast out the Devil.  Substitute vampires for demons, that’s pretty much the plot of Dracula … only, despite vandalism at Highgate Cemetery, there’s not too much realworld fall-out from the frequent revisitings of that story.  Anneliese Michel was far from the only victim of death during exorcism – a process which, as even The Exorcist admits, involves tying someone down and shouting at them, with additional physical abuse and Christian waterboarding – and Godless closes with a caption listing the names of a handful of victims, though it’s mostly based on the case of Joan Vollmer, an Australian woman who died in 1993 during an exorcism which lasted for days.

Lara Levonde (Georgia Eyers) is suffering from long-lasting depression – probably as a result of a traumatic incident, the death of her baby in a car crash – and exhibiting symptoms like sleepwalking (actually, sleep dancing).  Her husband Ron (Dan Ewing), devout but blistering with rage, wants her psychotherapist Dr Walsh (Eliza Matengu) to sign off on a recommendation for a Catholic exorcism, which she isn’t willing to do … which leads Ron, via his pastor Barbara (Rosie Traynor) – actually, significantly, the widow of his original pastor, who has taken over the congregation – to call in Daniel King (Tim Pocock), a trailer-park-dwelling, flask-swigging soldier of Christ who might be a con man who’s started to believe his own line or an extremist zealot no established church could authorise but who trades in certainties and sudden cures where medicine can only offer gradual treatments.  Early on, a plumber (Hugh Sexton) working away in the background of a domestic scene starts talking about fluoride conspiracies – suggesting Lara may have contributed to her baby’s death by having him vaccinated (we don’t know just how cracked this is, because the details of the death aren’t revealed till later) and then turning out to be a hallucination/demonic manifestation.  Requiem fastidiously stays outside Anneliese’s head, but Godless gives us Lara’s own view of the world – which includes fiery-horned demons, silver-tongued tempters, and tinfoil hat conspiracists – as well as that of her husband, who is big on control and disapproval.

The exorcism looks a lot like enhanced interrogation – with binding, battering, soaking, denial of food and sanitation and repeated verbal abuse – if we accept that there’s only Lara here, then what Danny does is horrific in the extreme … and Lara’s jibe (in a demon voice) that this backwoods is where the church sends ‘its boy-fuckers’ hints at the kind of abusers who’ve been proven time and again to find places in ministries – with a congregation who embark on an exorcism as a duty of faith or to help a neighbour but then can’t express their own doubts or exercise their consciences because Danny has set it up so that any criticism of him must be Satanically-inspired.  That’s how good people stand by and wave Bibles for days while a woman is murdered by inches in front of them.  Writer Alexander Angliss-Wilson and director Nick Kozakis mimic the many exorcism movies in plot structure and imagery, but also channel the torture horror genre which rose during the War on Terror … at one point, Lara breaks free and is chased through the forest by a mob of her supposed saviours … and the exorcist’s justification sounds much like the answers given by villains in tied-up-in-the-basement movies asked ‘why are you doing this to me?’  After the inevitable, there’s an audacious coda – as Danny makes a particularly outrageous claim, perhaps as a stratagem to shuck off blame and spin a disaster as a miracle, with offscreen legal manoeuvering which could sustain its own movie (or a three-part Crown Court).  It doesn’t take the easy out of demonising anyone – though there’s a melodrama chill to the moment when Lara appeals for help only to be told ‘we are helping you’.