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THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE:
Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) is dead at age 19. Her shocked family is grieving and afraid. The parish priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson), is charged with criminally negligent homicide because he supposedly told Emily to stop taking the medicine the doctors had prescribed. The young woman had been diagnosed with an epileptic psychotic disorder. But Father Moore and Emily believed the seizures were demonic possession.
Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), an agnostic criminal attorney, defends the priest. Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott) is the Methodist prosecuting attorney who believes only in science and facts. Through a series of chilling flashbacks, including a recording made of the exorcism, Emily’s story is told.
This horror film plays on the viewer’s fear of the cosmic supernatural unknown, as this genre often does. Director Scott Derrickson, who co-wrote Hellraiser: Inferno with Paul Harris Boardman, is at home with the religious horror genre. But he also has a rather Calvinistic theological agenda that seeks to scare people into faith rather than address the serious decision of when to exorcise people or when to refer them to psychiatric care.
Emily Rose is loosely based on the 1976 case of Anneliese Michel, who died at age 23. Two Bavarian priests were convicted of negligent homicide for their part in discontinuing her medication in favor of exorcism.
This film is not a remake of The Exorcist, although it does set up a similar contest between science and faith. Emily’s story is about her fate to witness to the darkness, not the light. Her epitaph is to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). Disturbing content and images.
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