The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
While watching Prey for the Devil, I had a constant and nagging feeling that I had seen this movie before. There are two reasons for this. First, I gradually remembered that I had seen trailers for this movie a year ago when it was called The Devil’s Light and scheduled for release last winter. The winter came and went with no sign of the film in theaters and I promptly forgot about it. The second reason for the nagging familiarity is the fact that Prey for the Devil is just a rehash of every moment and trope from every other exorcism movie ever made. This isn’t a particularly bad movie, nor is it particularly good. It is just a particularly unambitious movie that seeks to deliver exactly what one expects from this sort of film. Nothing more, nothing less.
Jacqueline Byers stars as Sister Ann, a young nun that grew up with a mentally ill mother that Ann suspects was the victim of demonic possession. Although the Catholic church does not allow women to perform exorcisms, a priest sees promise in Ann and allows her to attend classes on the subject (but still not allowed to perform the actual ritual). By attending these courses, Ann makes friends with Father Dante, another student in the course, and meets Natalie, a young possessed girl that is being held in a cell beneath the church because apparently that’s something that the church does. Ann and Dante then proceed through the basic story arc of a thousand movies that are exactly like this.
It’s sad that modern exorcism horror flicks are so much more restrained than The Exorcist, a film that was released nearly 50 years ago. When your subgenre starts off (at least in a mainstream sense) with a young girl vomiting in a priest’s face and masturbating with a crucifix, I suppose that there aren’t too many places left to go in terms of shock value. But an effort would be nice. Instead, Prey for the Devil trots out the same lame tropes that have dominated the genre for the last decade or so: bodies that twist at awkward angles, people crawling up walls (preferable backwards) and hair going into someone’s mouth (seriously when did this last visual become such a thing in these movies?). We have seen all of these things dozens of times, most often with similarly mundane results, so what is the point anymore? With such familiar, and strictly PG-13, scare tactics, Prey for the Devil does nothing to surpass other exorcism movies and makes no attempt to come close to The Exorcist. I didn’t expect this to surpass that classic, but it is too much to ask that it even try?
The frustrating thing is that there are a few moments when Prey for the Devil teases you with an interesting idea. There is the notion, introduced and quickly abandoned, that demons posses those that feel extreme guilt and don’t feel that they are worthy of god’s love. The embodiment of this is Father Dante’s sister, who becomes possessed and is denied an exorcism by the church after receiving an abortion. Despite the interesting paths and moral questions that this raises, the character simply dies off-screen in stunningly abrupt fashion, quickly eliminating any potentially interesting commentary that this could have raised. The mental health of Sister Ann’s mother was another potentially route for the film, but the concept of using mental health vs. possession as a proxy for the question of science vs. faith also goes nowhere and is abandoned in favor of the simplest answers possible and establishing a completely unnecessary plot twist. It sometimes does feel like there is a smart movie somewhere inside of Prey for the Devil, but it is constantly buried under an avalanche of studio notes.
Aside from those abandoned plot points from a better movie, the one bright spot is the performances, which also feel like they are coming from a better movie. Jacqueline Byers, who I’m not familiar with, gives it her all to bring an emotional core to the film, seemingly thinking that she is actually starring in The Exorcist rather than the millionth knock-off of it. Same with Christian Navarro as Father Dante, who also treats the material with more gravitas than it has deserved since the 1970s. I like to imagine that there is a better version of this movie in another dimension with these two characters having serious discussions about faith in the context of modern problems, but this aint it.
Prey for the Devil is exactly what you think it is. It’s October-time filler that only wants to yell “boo!” every ten minutes rather than contributing anything new to the genre. If that’s what you’re expecting, then you won’t be disappointed by the minimal level of competence on display here. If you are looking for more, then rewatch The Exorcist or The Exorcist III to remember how effective these stories can actually be.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_for_the_Devil#/media/File:The_Devil’s_Light_Poster.jpeg
