Rite, The : Movie Review


The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession a major plot-point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out—its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization within the church. It does, though, mean that any new attempt must come with a hook.

For one: Prefaced with a quote from Pope John Paul II, The Rite, set in a specifically Catholic milieu, courts believers. Also, in the character of Father Lucas, it introduces the exorcist as a workaday, house-calls healer. (As Lucas, Anthony Hopkins is disarmingly distracted, softly authoritative, and given to prancing when the role takes a bipolar turn.) “What’d you expect? Spinning heads, pea soup?” he asks a novice, young Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), who has just witnessed Lucas’s offhand bedside manner—he breaks from casting out demons to take a phone call—and the priest’s defiance of evil, grown almost into a casual rivalry through the years.


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Author : Nick Pinkerton