William Brent Bell

At best an average film concerning a young American girl Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), who travels to Rome where her mother, Maria (Suzan Crowley) is cooped up in an asylum, having gone "mad" during an exorcism some twenty years previously. Apparently Maria was being exorcised, broke her restrains and killed the three priests involved in the exorcism. Isabella is keen to make a documentary to try and help her understand what happened to her mother. She makes her way to the "Vatican School of Exorcism” where she befriends some priests including Father Ben Rawlings (Simon Quarterman) and Father David Keane (Evan Helmuth). Rawlings and Keane are renegade exorcists, performing the rituals out with the sanction of the Church. They invite Isabella along to one of their “illegal” underground exorcisms and from there it is a quick step to finding a way into the asylum where Maria is being held in order to exorcise her. As you would anticipate things go seriously wrong.
Director and co-writer William Brent Hill shoots in faux-documentary style, some of which works; most of which doesn’t. He brings nothing new to the style, but manages to get the low production values to work in his films' favour at certain points – particularly the underground exorcism. The storyline itself is ludicrous and full of nonsensical actions and plot holes, with characters behaving in frankly unbelievable ways. In addition it has a number of major structural flaws. When Isabella, for example, sits in at “exorcism class” and hears a lecture about multiple possession and demonic transfer and how great a danger that presents to the priest, then you don’t have to be a genius to figure out where the story is heading. The acting is workmanlike – Andrade in the lead role is amateurish and it is impossible to take the boyish Quarterman, who lacks any form of gravitas, seriously in the role of lead exorcist. On the plus side some of the exorcism sequences, although carbon copies of what we’ve seen before, are well handled and some of the contortion effects during the first exorcism sequence are very well presented. On the whole this is a decidedly average, thoroughly inoffensive film that is a decent little time-waster.… (mehr)