The supernatural hasn’t changed that much in the last few thousand years, says actor Edgar Ramirez, playing an ex-heroin addict Jesuit priest in this weekend’s horror-police procedural, Deliver Us From Evil.
But then again, do demons really need to do much more? Possessing people, moving inanimate objects around, messing with the lights — it’s still frightening, however many times you’ve seen it before.
Modern horror, has, of course changed the way those frights are delivered to us, and this film has a unique selling point: It’s based on a true story, written by an NYPD cop based on his supernatural experiences.
That true story is both its strength and its weakness. While it’s all the more chilling that the events depicted — the possession of a solider in Iraq, who brings the demon back to the Bronx, with devastating effects — apparently happened, it’s also more mundane and shallow because it’s, well, rainy ol’ real life.
PFC Mick Santino (in a powerhouse performance by British actor Sean Harris) and his comrade Jimmy stumble upon an abandoned altar to something evil in the Iraqi desert (actually Abu Dhabi’s Liwa). Next thing we know, Santino is back in a permanently rainy Bronx (those downpours became rather gimmicky), inducing a woman to kill her child at the zoo.
Cops Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) and Butler (Joel McHale, just the right amount of comic relief) are always on the lookout for some action, guided by Sarchie’s “radar” for trouble, and so head to investigate the zoo attack. That’s where Sarchie (the real-life policeman who wrote the book on which the film is based) finds himself tangled up in evil. He at first believes it’s purely human nastiness, of which he’s already seen so much of in the Bronx that he can barely speak to his wife and daughter.
Mendoza, the most shaded character in the film, convinces him something much worse is going on, via the obligatory visit to an insane asylum.
There are plenty of gross-out moments and spooky thrills here for those looking for a good Friday night fright, and fans of police dramas will enjoy the structure, which brings cop logic to the world of exorcisms.
But I was bothered by the lack of backstory to the demon — it simply takes over, but why? Where did it come from and who built the altar in the desert? Mendoza’s character attempts to explain this lack of information, saying that’s what demons do — destruction that has no meaning, none for us humans, anyway. As in real life, there’s never really any closure.
