Review by Beatrice On 04-Oct-2023
If reason is a system of rules that men have given themselves so that they can live together, religion guards that pre-rational background that men inhabit more deeply and intimately than they adapt to rational convention. That is why it is necessary to drop the gross distinction that separates believers from non-believers. In fact, one and the other inhabit those basic metaphors that religion, before philosophy and before science, has indicated by signaling the separation between sacred and profane, between man´s space and space transcending the human, between time of life and time that precedes and transcends life.
Haiti Port Au Prince
Victor is on vacation with his pregnant wife, who decides to undergo a voodoo ritual for the birth of Angela.
A terrible earthquake will overwhelm the Haitian capital and his body, and the decision to be made is whether to save his wife or the baby.
Thirteen years later: Georgia
Victor has lovingly raised his daughter Angela, who grows close to her mother's objects jealously preserved by her father.
When one day, telling a lie, she goes into a forest with her best friend Katherine, disappearing for three days, everything will change and both her father and her friend's very believing family will have to confront situations where evil, violence, unpredictability and mystery will take over.
The first in David Gordon Green's second trilogy, following Hallowen, is presented this way by the director, "We're about to begin a very different kind of technical journey than Hallowen. I don't even necessarily classify it as a horror film, although it's very appealing from a horror perspective, it's psychological and dramatic. It doesn't have the fun tension on command that Hallowen would have, because it can't lean on any of the campier qualities that I think we enjoy from time to time in Hallowen movies. It's very serious and pretty straightforward, and I don't know, but I'm excited about it."
In fact, it is not a horror film, though it does have to resort to a few scenes that ape the genre and especially tries to justify the title by honoring the evolution of Chris MacNeil's character 50 years after the release of Friedkin's first Exorcist in '73.
No longer here are the two priests trying to exorcise the demon that allegedly took possession of the two girls: the church has decided not to participate, has decided to distance itself, and while the young priest remains outside the house, Angela's non-believing father, finding him in the car recites an unforgettable sarcastic line.
Like the one where he claims, "You believers are all the same: if something good happens it was God, if something bad happens then it's the devil."
In addition to the religious reading, anthropological and psychological interpretations are in fact also given of the sacred, because the sacred is not only "external" to man, but also "internal" to him, as his unconscious background, from which one day consciousness emancipated itself and became autonomous, without, however, suppressing the enigmatic and dark background of its origin. On this origin the consciousness still depends both for the genesis of its ideations and for the never averted threat of being sucked again into those forms that the modern "pathology," into which the ancient "mythology" has resolved itself, calls madness. To know this madness are not so much psychology, psychoanalysis or psychiatry, religion, which, delimiting and circumscribing the area of the sacred, and keeping it at the same time "separate" from the community of men and "accessible" through codified rituals, has set the conditions so that men could build the cosmos of reason, the only one they can inhabit, without removing the abyss of chaos, the terrible opening toward the opaque and dark source that calls into question the very foundation of rationality. For it is from that world that come the words that reason then orders in a non-oracular and non-enigmatic way.
The first meeting with the girls was attended by Regan's elderly mother ( from the first Exorcist), who no longer knows where her daughter is.
The interesting aspect is that both girls have something unresolved with the family; one because she was born by virtue of her mother's death, with a non-believing father and an unconscious that has dug up what happened; the other, the first child of an extremely believing family where her malaise is better detected by her younger siblings than by her parents blinded by the pursuit of good.
The scene in the church where Katherine, in the throes of malaise repeats screaming "the body and the blood"... is a perfect description of this.
In the enclosure of the sacred, which the ancients were careful to demarcate because what is manifested there is blatant contradiction, outsized enthusiasm, deaf and dumb pain, "sacrifices" take place (of which the Christian transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is the last trace), in that transfiguration of all signs and words that religions with their symbols have been able to codify. If the sacred recedes too far, we risk forgetting the rules that men have learned to protect themselves, and then the sacred breaks in and its violence produces the dissolution of the community or, in a psychological key, of the personality.
But even more interesting is the following element of the film: in order to face the battle with evil, priests and the Catholic faith are not enough, the intervention of psychiatry and medicine, heart rate monitors, those who have gone through the same experiences, agnostics, preachers, the voodoo priestess, blacks or whites, are resorted to.
A religious, atheistic, agnostic, rational, scientific, cultural syncretism where the sacred is mixed with the profane, good with evil, chaos with order.
The sacred, in fact, as shown by the tragic outcomes to which conflict between faiths often leads, is a regime of utmost suicidal and homicidal violence, where expressions of radical rejection of existing normality, symbolic processes of rebirth and transformation, events of death are at play and where at stake are those situations-limits around which have always gathered those regulators of the sacred who in all cultures are called "priests," long provided with those basic metaphors in which humanity recognizes itself, when the madness of the mind disorients the soul and subtracts, from the quiet advance of reason, any persuasive force.
The two young girls, like the other young people they meet at the beginning of the film, seem to embody this uneasiness: that which geometrically establishes high and low, which places the good on the right and the bad on the left, which draws heaven and earth, which distinguishes rationality from madness.
This turns out to be the "miracle" that has taken hold of David Gordon Green, who, in the many forms and genres assumed in his films, echoes circling around the atavistic human and inhuman but above all superhuman theme of good and evil.
The noise of the world must not invade, with the cry of affirmation or denial, the silent origin from which all words have sprung.
04-Oct-2023 by Beatrice