Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist

**** out of ****

          Any filmmaker approaching a sequel to The Exorcist should know that it is impossible to top the absolute, unremitting terror that the classic horror film achieved. I wrote in my review of that film, “The Exorcist has been heralded as the scariest movie of all time. I would say that the scariest movie of all time could not compare to the way that director William Freidkin manages to wiggle this film underneath the audiences’ skin and hold it there for over two hours. … This is a film that attacks you psychologically, emotionally, and perhaps even physically.” Later films, both in and out of the Exorcist franchise, tried to compete with Freidkin’s vision by trying to outdo its startling images and terrifying sequences, but thus far, these follow-ups have only served to remind us how perfectly The Exorcist does what it does. If you are going to make another chapter in the series, you must first and foremost let The Exorcist be The Exorcist. You must be brave (and humble) enough to take your entry in another direction entirely that complements the original without stepping on its toes (which was the fatal flaw of John Boorman’s poorly received Exorcist II: The Heretic).

          Even William Peter Blatty, who wrote the original novel and the screenplay to Freidkin’s film, understood this. He penned and directed two successful Exorcist sequels himself, The Ninth Configuration and Exorcist III, which were respectively a post-war drama and a serial killer thriller with little connections to the first film, save a few recurring characters. Both films are fascinating, gripping pieces, because as the writer of the original, Blatty understood what his copycats did not: The true power of The Exorcist is not in its gross-out gags, but in its theological philosophy: That our struggles with faith could be manifested in the literal battle between God and Satan over the body of a little girl.

          Paul Schrader, who once called The Exorcist the greatest metaphor in all of cinema, understands this too. His Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist steers clear of any attempt to capture the power of the first film and is instead content with probing the cosmos with theological questions of his own about the nature of evil. Such probing should be expected from the man who wrote some of the greatest films about guilt and redemption ever made (among them Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Bringing out the Dead, and The Last Temptation of Christ), and his new film is an equally fascinating look into humanity’s flawed, often puzzlingly despicable nature. The result is a uniquely great film that does not resemble The Exorcist, but it does offer insightful clues that point us towards a new interpretation of the classic, as it seeks to explain why the Devil would ever feel compelled to possess an innocent’s body to begin with.

          Schrader and his writers take the same approach that Blatty took with his sequels by eschewing a story with a direct, linear connection with The Exorcist and instead focusing on a minor character from the original film. In The Ninth Configuration, that character was astronaut Lt. Cutshaw. In The Exorcist III, it was Detective Bill Kinderman. In Dominion, it is Father Lankester Merrin, the exorcist who so famously appeared in the final act of the first film to represent the forces of God against Satan. He was an elder man in that film, played with authority and a mysterious creepiness by Max von Sydow. Here, as played by Stellan Skarsgård, he’s younger, more robust, and struggling with guilt over a terrible secret that has put his religious faith on hold. Dominion is his tale, about how he was first introduced to the Evil that exists in the world, and his triumph over it.

          But the triumph doesn’t come easily: In the opening scenes, Merrin is forced at gunpoint to commit an act so unspeakable that it lingers over him, and us, through the remainder of the film. He is a broken man when we meet him years later in East Africa; as he sadly observes at one point: “Man can choose good or evil. I chose good. Evil happened anyway.” Merrin does not need to believe in the Devil in order to believe in evil; he sees the worst visions of hell by simply observing the actions of his fellow man.

          The bulk of the film takes place in and around an archeological dig in East Africa. Surprisingly, most of the story hardly concerns the Devil at all, who only makes a belated appearance in the film’s final act. Instead, Schrader focuses on the customs of the African locals and the cultural clashes between them and the British, who see the locals as “savages” through their Christian lenses. Terrible, evil things happen in the film, but we cannot blame these events on any satanic force. Man seems content to destroy each other without the aid of the Dark Prince, and as long as they embrace that selfish nature, no religion or “civilizing” is going to save them. Case in point: Early on in the film, a fellow priest looks on at some local, ritualistic sacrifices in horror and stutters, “I cannot believe that these savages would kill so brutally!” Merrin’s sly answer: “Yes. It sort of looks like a scene from the Inquisition, doesn’t it?” Merrin’s bitter answer is also a painfully insightful one: Our evil runs deep—deeper even than our attempts to explain it away with man-made religious organizations.

          The violent nature found in both paganism and Christianity seems to be the main theme throughout Dominion. In one of the most revealing sequences, a British soldier shoots a young African girl, and the villagers run away in fear. The next morning, the Christian school teacher is shocked to see so many African children attend his school. Their rationale provides what is probably the film’s most heartbreaking scene: “Jesus Christ is an angry god. He killed that girl, and if we don’t come to school, he will kill us too.” To Schrader, a Christian who helped create the most moving portrait of Christ I could ever imagine in The Last Temptation of Christ, there is a significant difference between the Christ of the Gospels and the imperialistic Christ who has been forced upon reluctant citizens of the British empire. The latter Christ is as much a savage, pagan god as any ritualistic, human sacrifice could create. This scene eventually ends in total devastation and tragedy: A local shaman comes in and slaughters all the children, so they will not be corrupted by this false, evil god named Jesus Christ.

          Scenes like this continue to play out in Dominion, topped with the internal, bitter guilt over past sins that Merrin, a spectator to these events, constantly struggles with. The longer these scenes and ideas linger, the more the Divine powers seem like some sort of distant fable, crushed under the weight of human beings’ own acts against each other. When Satan finally makes an appearance, the film’s prior moments of outrage and human suffering are tied brilliantly together, because Schrader reveals exactly how the Great Deceiver works his enticing magic. His power is not in the evil that consumes humanity, which is seemingly capable of destroying the Earth on its own. Satan’s influence, rather, is in the ability to simply watch human nature do its worst, and when despair and turmoil have finally nearly beaten us, he comes in great beauty and promises a solution: He will not to take away our evil, but he will remove our guilt. His alternative is not an offer to change our natures, but rather to numb us into apathy. He desensitizes us to our evil, allows us to believe that it is inevitable and unchangeable. He simply makes us not care about ourselves anymore.

          This notion is presented in the most convincing, original depiction of a demonic possession since the original Exorcist. It is appropriate, then, that Schrader provides an image that is the polar opposite of the pea-soup-spitting Linda Blair: A homeless, deformed cripple named Cheche (Billy Crawford) is the possessed, but instead of being made hideous, his body is made beautiful, and he becomes articulate, graceful, and powerful. To cast Satan out of him would be to make him crippled again, and that is the point: Satan’s power is not vile and disgusting, but tantalizingly attractive. If The Exorcist provided a representation of Satan’s thrill in our despair, Dominion reveals his obsession to control us—the influence he wants over our guilt, our pain, even our images of God. To gain our submission, he will offer the beauty not found in our human nature—but the price is not just our souls, but our very conscience.

         So where is God in this picture? Schrader seems to be saying that when God chose to give us the freedom of choice, He relinquished his control over the earth. God is therefore hindered by our own free will, by our inherent drive to kill one another, fueled mainly by our inability to see the world beyond our own cultural understanding of it. Yet He remains present as long as we have our conscience, as long as we can still feel guilt for our sins. Thus, God always fights on our behalf, trying to break through to us in moments of selflessness and kindness between people. As long as love and conscience exist, the possibility for our redemption remains. According to Schrader, that’s why God allows bad things to happen to us—because it reinforces our repulsion for the evil within us, and it reminds us of our need for redemption. The battle between God and Satan has nothing to do with our own inherent evil, but with our perception of it: God wants our guilt to horrify us; Satan wants to remove guilt from the equation. When we have guilt, we know we need God. Without guilt, we need nothing. The film does finally provide an obligatory exorcism scene, but as we watch it, we wonder if Merrin is not driving the Devil out of poor Cheche so much as he is finally embracing the guilty conscience within himself, and at last counting it as an asset.

          I will leave it to you to see how this exorcism plays out, and how all the characters deal with the guilt that chokes them. What I will say is that Schrader has assembled a talented cast and crew to make a film that offers some fresh perspectives on the most important theological questions that have faced mankind since our slime first crawled out of the ocean. By the end of the film, we leave Merrin where he begins in The Exorcist: A lone, world-weary priest driven by his own thirst for redemption to defeat Satan’s war on guilt. The final shot is clearly an homage to the famous final scene in John Ford’s The Searchers (one of Schrader’s favorite films), in which a lonely desperado retreats to the wilderness to battle his own demons. Merrin must battle his demons as well, but unlike the character in Ford’s film, he has managed to take his bitterness and turn it into a means to shine light on a dark world.

          Readers familiar with the history behind Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist will note that I haven’t mentioned anything about its troubled history with its production company, Morgan Creek Films. This history eventually led to the film being remade as Exorcist: The Beginning, directed by Renny Harlin, which was a most unsuccessful exploitation picture. Instead of using this review as a means to further attack Morgan Creek for the existence of Harlin’s film, I think the best criticism against it would be to simply watch the two films back-to-back. Harlin used a similar storyline and most of the same cast to create a film that made the aforementioned fatal mistake of trying to replicate The Exorcist. The result was a mindless splatter-fest that, ironically, proved correct Schrader’s notion that Satan’s primary aim is to desensitize us to our own depravity. Schrader’s film is much more scaled down—less violent, hardly any jumps, no pointless scenes of gore, no high-tech exorcism. His is a quieter, more contemplative picture, which looks beyond the thrills of The Exorcist and gets to its theological heart. It is not a “scary” film, but it is one that reveals frightening implications about our nature.

          Now that Schrader has proved that there is still life left in the Exorcist film series, I can’t help but think that there are even more stories to tell in this universe. In light of the success of Blatty’s own sequels, he, Schrader, or someone with their vision really ought to expand upon the notion that they introduced in their films: The focus on the minor characters of The Exorcist that reveal their personal struggles with evil and their uphill road to redemption. One of the great things about The Exorcist is that it contained so many fascinating little characters who were clearly dealing with their own private demons. Regan’s possession merely served as a literal allegory for their pain; now we need more films explaining what that pain is. We already know about Merrin, Cutshaw, and Kinderman. How about films concerning Karl the Butler, or Burke Dennings the alcoholic director, or Dr. Klein the chain-smoking physician? If Morgan Creek is so obsessed with continuing a respectable Exorcist franchise, there’s a suggestion more promising than Renny Harlin.

Cast:
Stellan Skarsgård: Merrin
Clara Bellar: Rachel
Gabriel Mann: Father Francis
Billy Crawford: Cheche
Ralph Brown: Sergeant Major

Warner Brothers presents a film by Morgan Creek Productions. Directed by Paul Schrader. Written by Caleb Carr and William Wisher. Based on characters created by William Peter Blatty. Rated R, for violence and disturbing images. Running time: 116 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: May 20, 2005.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com