God forbid we’d ever objectify marginalised demons just trying to get some overdue recognition for all their hard-working heinousness, but really; once you’ve seen one exorcism, you’ve kind of seen them all, am I right? At any rate, the apparently evil-obsessed Scott Derrickson definitely has, having previously written and/or directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Devil’s Knot and Hellraiser:Inferno. A pattern begins to emerge. Could someone please get this man a puppy, a Nora Ephron boxset and some new ideas, please?
Derrickson’s latest flick Deliver Us From Evil lives up ­­— or down ­— to the low expectations of its painfully derivative title, and unsurprisingly suffers from the same cheap faults as his other (better) works. Dark buildings are navigated via flashlights, jump scares are rife, there are many painfully predictable “twists”, a skeptical leading man and the obligatory disembodied voice emerging from a possessed host. It’s all a bit been there, exorcised that – a pity, because there are some spirited performances just praying for better material.
Eric Bana heads up the cast as a jaded NYPD cop who stumbles on a series of mysterious cases, and very slowly begins to accept that the weird symbols and bloody, hoodied man he keeps seeing may be more than a graffiti-spraying ASBO kid. Bana’s damaged, intense character proves intriguing, as he struggles to accept the real, mortal horrors he sees on the job. Yet this real distress exposing the film’s failings, by underscoring the essential cheat of supernatural horror: humanity is never to blame, but demons. By repeating the same old tired exorcism tropes, Derrickson ends up cheating twice – and God knows he has no-one to blame but himself.