In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film I Confess, a young priest in Quebec City is suspected of murder because of his unwillingness to break the seal of confession. A major theme of the film is the incomprehension with which the world sees the priesthood, such that people project their own sins onto the priest, resulting in a kind of white martyrdom.

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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission.

The new exorcism film The Ritual, starring Al Pacino and Dan Stevens, is based on the famous 1928 exorcism of Emma Schmidt, which also partially inspired The Exorcist. The Ritual is touted as more realistic and meticulously researched than most exorcism films, and it does seem to portray the rite of exorcism accurately (as the title indicates, most of the film is focused on the ritual itself). The film avoids many of the worst pitfalls of exorcism movies, such as fascination with the glamor of evil, sadism, etc. It is a Catholic-approvable treatment of the subject in that it avoids theological error, the liturgy is accurate, and God is clearly shown to be more powerful than demons. However, the film is still sensationalistic, not because its extraordinary demonic manifestations are fabricated, but because they are excessively centered at the expense of more interesting and edifying aspects of the real-life case. Those details which would have made the treatment unique and thought-provoking are too often filed down to fit the genre’s cliches or to avoid alienating a non-Catholic audience.

The Ritual will be in theaters starting June 6.

Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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00:00 Introduction

12:44 Form

1:04:15 Themes

1:28:17 Moral problems

1:52:00 Favorite sequences

After the artistic triumph of his magnum opus The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick had an unwontedly prolific period, releasing To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017). In these films, known informally as the "Weightless Trilogy", Malick took his previous formal experimentation even further, relying heavily on improvisation stitched together with a stream-of-consciousness editing style evoking the fragments of memory. The results are undeniably aesthetically exciting, but also critically divisive, as many viewers find the latter two films particularly to lack narrative substance.

The films have been of special interest to many Christians because of their explicit allusions to faith and their depiction of the emptiness of worldly pleasures as the characters search for something more. To the Wonder in particular is noteworthy for its priest character played by Javier Bardem, and because it deals with the issue of contraception and how being closed off to children destroys a relationship (the importance of children being a theme in all three films).

Across the trilogy, Malick deals with the topic of sexuality in a way seen nowhere else in modern Hollywood, consistently showing the breakdown of sexuality in excess, deviance, and using others as destructive and even sinful. In that and in other respects, the films are profoundly countercultural.

However, this is dangerous material to handle in any medium, cinema above all. Malick is not always successful in threading the needle with moral purity in execution, however praiseworthy his thematic intentions. This makes it impossible to recommend these films for a wide viewership, or to anyone without caveats. Nonetheless, a discussion of these films, with all their strengths and weaknesses, is essential in considering the direction of religious cinema today - and in this episode Thomas Mirus, James Majewski, and Nathan Douglas do just that.

Note: YouTube has censored versions (TV-14, blurred nudity and bleeped profanity) of Knight of Cups and Song to Song, for free with ads.

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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com