No
matter how lapsed they think they are, lapsed Catholics are still Catholics.
MMA champion Park Yong-hu denies it, but he is a perfect case in point. For
years, he claimed he did not believe in God, but he was really just angry over
his father’s death. He would still seem like an unlikely candidate to carry the
stigmata, but there it is anyway. Despite his skepticism, Park gets pulled into
an epic battle of G vs. E in Kim Joo-hwan’s The Divine Fury, the closing
film of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival, which opens tomorrow in
New York.
Park’s
father was a devout policeman, who was killed by a demonically possessed
motorist during a routine traffic stop. Alas, Park’s prayers were not enough to
save him. Subsequently, Park turned against God and allowed his heart to harden
against the rest of humanity. Then one day, his palm starts bleeding from a
wound that refuses to close. Starting with doctors and proceeding to shamans,
Park is mysteriously directed to Father Ahn, a grizzled Vatican exorcist.
The
good Father has returned to Korea to hunt for the Dark Bishop, a powerful servant
of demonic powers. He has been responsible for a wave of frighteningly severe
possessions, like the one Park walks in on, saving Father Ahn with the power of
his stigmata. Much to his surprise, he does not dislike Father Ahn. In fact, he
almost feels compelled to help him, but the forces of evil, led by Ji-sin, the Dark
Bishop himself, will be relentless and vicious.
Relentless
is indeed the word. Divine Fury has some of the most intense and
exhausting exorcism scenes since the mother of all exorcism films, Friedkin’s The
Exorcist. Arguably, Jang Jae-hyun’s The Priests is even more frightening,
because it leans into the Catholic imagery and demonic archetypes to a greater
extent, but Divine is still all kinds of scary and intense.
There
is no question veteran thesp Ahn Sung-ki is the rock on which Divine Fury is
built. He is absolutely terrific as the weary Father Ahn. We are used to seeing
movie exorcists who are either blind believers or mired in a crisis of faith,
but Father Ahn is particularly compelling, because he has faith as well as self-doubts,
making him acutely human. For the better part of the film, Park Seo-joon is
rather standoffish as Park Yong-hu, but he humanizes the fighter when the film
really needs him to. In contrast, Woo Do-hwan is never less than coldly,
clammily sinister as the Dark Bishop.