Jorge Darnell’s The
Devil’s Exorcist is a surprisingly effective meeting of disparate elements,
from the clinical to the woozily
transgressive, blurring the line between haphazardly opportunistic and shrewdly
evasive. The film was made a couple of years after The Exorcist and
starts with a shot of a young girl writhing in possessed manner on her bed, but
instant expectations of a Friedkin knock-off are never quite realized: the main
narrative line involves a doctor (seemingly a behavioral specialist of some kind)
trying to help the girl, but her efforts aren't conceived or described as an
exorcism, and it’s only at the very end that the film presents an event that
can’t be attributed to mental illness or interpreted as a subjective vision. Made
in the dying days of Spain’s Franco era, the film draws (cautiously) on expanding
artistic freedom, while remaining tethered to the past, a tension encapsulated in
the contrast between the girl’s wealthy family (the father’s disinterest is cited
as one possible cause of her dysfunction) and the old family servant, whose
every appearance evokes a vanished culture, and in the contrast between
overbearing formal spaces (the girl suffers near-meltdowns both in a church and
on a visit to a wax museum) and the clean white lines of the institute where
the doctor practices; some of its imagery, such as disembodied arms protruding
from swimming pools and walls, might have been plucked from a fuzzily-conceived
art exhibit. The film presents other extreme contrasts of tone and content, for
example between the girl’s chillingly matter-of-fact murder of a sick child in
the hospital (one of several events made all the more disconcerting by the absence
of any subsequent mention or consequences), and the climactic prominence of a
stuffed fish seemingly almost daring us to scoff (I somehow resisted).
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