The Ritual: Based on the “Real-Life” Story of Emma Schmidt

Father Carl Vogl’s book, Begone Satan was like the 1930’s equivalent of Jay Anson’s Amityville Horror. It convinced a lot of otherwise skeptical readers that Satanic supernatural horror might really be real. Anson’s book had multiple movie treatments, of radically varying quality. Now the case Father Vogl (and also Time magazine) documented has inspired David Midell’s The Ritual, which opens today in theaters.

Father Joseph Steiger is a man of the cloth, but he also considers himself a modern man of reason, so he is stunned and confused when his Monsignor orders him to host the exorcism of Emma Schmidt. The exorcist will be Father Theophilus Riesinger, a Capuchin priest with a history of battling demonic possession. In fact, he already attempted a previous exorcism of Schmidt several years prior.

However, Father Steiger is skeptical, He frequently suggests Schmidt would be better off with a psychiatrist rather than an exorcist. Unfortunately, she and Riesinger arrived while he was amidst a full-blown crisis of faith, precipitated by his brother’s shocking suicide. Frankly, viewers might think the chaos unlashed during Riesinger’s exorcism sessions, which injures several attending nuns, should convince the good Father (and he is a good Father) that something uncanny and evil plagues Schmidt. However, doubt is powerful and it undermines faith, making men vulnerable to evil.

Indeed, doubt is a very human weakness, which is really the film’s bedrock theme. It is Father Steiger’s doubt and Father Riesinger’s guilt that the Evil One exploits. Yet, their weaknesses also make the priests ever so human.

Arguably, Dan Stevens might just deliver his best performance since Downton Abbey portraying the very American looking and sounding Father Steiger. He is keenly sympathetic, even when he chastely flirts with Sister Rose (his “work wife”). Similarly, Al Pacino does his best work in years as Father Riesinger. Admittedly, his accent is highly dubious, but at least it is consistent. More to the point, he forgoes all his usual tics, mannerisms, and Hoo-ah’s, disappearing into the character instead.

Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo

During the off-season, Herr Konig’s mountain resort is like the Overlook without the snow. He is also conspicuously creepy. Nevertheless, Gretchen’s father Luis and step-mom Beth are thrilled to design his expansion, even though it means uprooting her at a time when she is emotionally reeling. The Alpine air will not be therapeutic in director-screenwriter Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, which opens Friday in New York.

Konig oozes sleaze and he has boundary issues, but Luis and Beth are blindly convinced he is good people. They are still awkward around Gretchen, since she used to live with her mother (obviously now deceased). However, they clearly pay more attention to her seven-year-old step-sister Alma, who is mysteriously mute.

Frankly, Gretchen is only too willing to get away from them, accepting a part-time job at the reception desk. However, Herr Konig is bizarrely adamant she must return home before nightfall. Before much time passes, she notices how often female guests suddenly start vomiting after their arrival. Her suspicions were already building, even before a mysterious hooded woman chases her home one night.

Yet, even when Gretchen winds up hospitalized with injuries, Alma still gets more attention for her sudden seizures. She is pretty sure Her Konig is somehow responsible for all the sinister business afoot, which Henry Landau, a disgraced ex-cop (who blames Konig for his wife’s tragic fate) confirms. Although he tries to forge an alliance with Gretchen, she instinctively recognizes he is too unstable to trust.

As a film, Cuckoo is also somewhat inconsistent, but it clicks much more often than it clunks. Dan Stevens is spectacularly sinister and clammy as Herr Konig, far eclipsing his flamboyant horror villains in Abigail and The Guest. Singer also keeps a steady stream of inventive weirdness coming. Did you know cuckoo birds are “brood parasites,” who stash their eggs in other birds’ nests? That turns out to be an important Cliff Clavin factoid that Singer makes much of.

Radio Silence’s Abigail

This kidnapping will be a lot like “The Ransom of Red Chief,” but with lots more blood. The gang has no idea who they are kidnapping until it is way too late. Instead of paying to return her, these criminals will pay with their lives in Abigail, the latest horror movie from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, the filmmaking tandem known as Radio Silence, which opens tomorrow nationwide.

Most of the crew did not know they were abducting a “child” and none of them knew the identity of her father. They did not know each other, either. Lambert, their boss, is against giving them code-names, but he reluctantly assigns them Rat Pack handles. Amusingly, but all too believably, the significance is lost on most of the lowlifes.

“Joey” has military medical training, so she will be Abigail’s babysitter. The “young girl” will definitely not need medical treatment from her. The gang soon freaks out when “Frank,” their swaggering team leader, figures out Abigail’s father is a notorious Keyser Soze-like crime-lord. However, he is the least of their worries. It turns out the Rat Pack was intentionally trapped inside Lambert’s haunted mansion-like hideout, with the predatory Abigail.

The exact nature of Abigail’s lethalness is basically an open secret, but reviews are still supposed to refrain from spelling it out. Regardless, it is pretty clear she is more than a “Bad Seed.” She is an entire bad farm.

The fake Rat Pack also gets a good deal of laughs for their sociopathic snark and moronic meatheadedness. Dan Stevens (Cousin Matthew in Downton Abbey) delivers a lot of the former, dipping back into his psycho trick bag from The Guest. Kevin Durand supplies most of the latter as the hulking “Peter.” William Catlett is appropriately hardnosed as the ex-military sniper, misnamed “Rickles.” The late Angus Cloud does another Eminem impersonation as “Dean,” but his obvious personality-dysfunction helps further complicate the poisonous group dynamic. The same is true of Kathryn Newton’s impressive freakouts as high-strung hacker “Sammy.”

Unfortunately, Melissa Barrera is supposed to slow-burn as the guilt-wracked Joey, but she is definitely the weakest, least defined member of the Rat Pack. She looks credible in the blood-drenched fight scenes, but that is about all she brings to the table. Frankly, the producers of the Scream franchise really did not give up much when they fired her from their next film, because of what they justifiably described as her antisemitic “hate speech.” There are monsters in real life too.

Kill Switch: Cousin Matthew in the Parallel Universe

It is sort of like cloning for the sake of organ harvesting, but on a cosmic scale. Through the magic of theoretical physics, Alterplex Corp have created a parallel universe, expressly so we can extract energy from it to power our world. The so-called “Echo” would be a reflection of our universe, but supposedly without any organic life forms. Instead, they succeeded too well, generating a perfect duplicate, including all the people. Thanks to an eco-terrorist attack, the creation process did not run as smoothly as planned. In fact, both universes are in danger imploding in Tim Smit’s Kill Switch (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Kill Switch is about as close to a first-person shooter video game as a film can get while still keeping some kind of plot. Former NASA pilot and egghead physicist Will Porter was hired by Alterplex to pilot a pod to the Echo and turn on the energy extractor. Apparently, he did so and now all Hell is breaking loose. When Alterplex started sucking power out of the Echo, the unstable mirror universe started sucked back large masses (ships and trains falling from the sky) to compensate.

It seems everyone has a doppelganger in the Echo, except Porter. His double died during the initial chaos. With his power levels declining, Porter will have to decide whether it is time to use the “Re-divider” or kill switch, the put a stop to the mutual Armageddon. However, that means one of the universes will be sacrificed.

Given the provocative premise, Kill Switch probably sounds headier than it is. In any event, you cannot accuse Smit of playing for small stakes. In fact, the Macguffin is quite clever, the slam-bang pacing races along like a high-performance sports car, and the apocalyptic effects are surprising well-realized. Arguably, it also treats the shadowy corporation and the fanatical environmentalist with roughly equivalent suspicion and disdain.

It is slightly ironic Dan Stevens, Cousin Matthew in Downton Abbey, plays Porter, the Yank who uproots his family (a widowed sister and her traumatized son), relocating to Europe. Nonetheless, he holds up his end rather well, especially consider we only really see him in the flashback scenes. Bérénice Marlohe is convincingly cool, smart, and dangerous as his colleague Abigail Vos (in both universes). For what it’s worth, Mike Libanon is also all kinds of sinister as the zealous spiritual leader of the eco-terrorists, but this isn’t exactly a film requiring classically-trained chops. It is more about running and dodging and weaving and more running.

Of course, that is not a bad thing. Far from it. Kill Switch takes pride in its action and delivers accordingly. Yet, it is still smarter than we would expect. Recommended for fans of shoot ‘em up dystopians, Kill Switch opens this Friday (6/16) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

The Guest: Unpacking a Little Death and Destruction

The Petersons should have remembered what Ben Franklin said about fish and houseguests. Initially, the mysterious “David” is so handy to have around the house, he earns more than three days. Unfortunately, the suspicions of their twenty year old daughter will be fully justified in Adam Wingard’s The Guest (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

When Caleb Peterson was killed in Iraq, it devastated his family, particularly his mother Laura. However, meeting “David,” Caleb’s freshly discharged friend and fellow squad member, offers her some consolation. Despite his humble origins, David is so faultlessly polite and gracious, she immediately invites the former soldier to be their guest, for as long as takes to back on his feet. Her husband Spencer is rather put out by her impulsiveness, until he spends some quality drinking time with David. Soon only their daughter Anna remains uncomfortable with the arrangement.

Within the context of the film, it is easy to understand why the Petersons so readily embrace their guest, at the expense of common sense. After all, he seems to bring good luck. In reality, David starts clandestinely “lending a hand” to the Peterson family, doing the sort of things they always secretly wished would happen, but would never admit. Sometimes Wingard and his screen-writer collaborator Simon Barrett maintain some ambiguity, as to just what David did or did not do, but there is no question about his proactive approach to the high school bullies tormenting the youngest Peterson sibling. Even Anna warms to David, but plot contrivances will interrupt their mounting sexual tension.

The first half of The Guest is absolutely terrific, inviting viewers to vicariously enjoy David’s freelance friend-of-the-family activism. Let’s face it, there are times everyone wished they had a secret benefactor who could make troublesome people disappear, but without any knowledge or culpability troubling our consciences.

Frustratingly, much of what works in the first half is largely lost in the second. Instead of a Nietzschean super-man, we learn David is a veritable super-soldier, thanks to a clichéd top secret government program, following in the tradition of the Universal Soldier franchise and scores of similar b-movies. What was once a very sly thriller becomes a formulaic exercise in comeuppance for a Blackwater-like military contractor in a tiresome by-the-numbers endgame.

That is a real shame, because it squanders the intriguing performances and cleverly executed action scenes from the early acts. Formerly of Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens could not get any further from Cousin Matthew than the mysterious David, but he pulls it off (clearly after putting in his time at the gym). He commands the screen with his sociopathic charm. Frankly, his supposedly Kentucky accent often sounds weird, like he is speaking through a Vocoder, but it kind of works nonetheless. As Anna, Maika Monroe generates plenty of heat with Stevens, while maintaining a sense of propriety and intelligence.

The Guest has the right look and soundtrack to appeal to nostalgia for the 1980s action movies that inspired it. It is considerably more entertaining when it allows its title character to be a wildcard instead of a Terminator surrogate. Ultimately, it is a potentially great cult film that is undermined by a screenplay too intent on making statements. The first fifty or sixty percent will be recommended for genre fans when it eventually hits Netflix, but they should probably hold off when the whole uneven thing opens this Wednesday (9/17) in New York at the AMC Empire and Village 7.