More of a courtroom drama than a horror movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is bound to confound expectations. Anyone coming into the film expecting a full-on bloodbath or nonstop scare-fest as implied in the previews will be sorely disappointed. Although there are plenty of genuinely scary moments—more, in fact, than in most other so-called horror films—the meat of the film is not the scares but the exploration of faith and what happens when our supposedly rational system of justice comes up against the unexplainable.
Based on actual events that occurred in Germany to a girl named Anneliese Michel, the film is heavily fictionalized, but still comes off as authentic and believable within its context. Movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror (and their recent remakes) take real events and make them into over-the-top horror, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (Tobe Hooper's original Chainsaw Massacre is a deserved classic), but it's often an easy way out. Although it's directed by a veteran of straight-to-video horror sequels, Exorcism is an exercise in restraint, doling out scares at a steady but slow pace, yet managing to create suspense throughout the film the old-fashioned way: by making you care about what happens to the characters.
The film starts as its title character (Jennifer Carpenter) is being hauled away in a body bag from her family's farm, with the troubled Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) looking on. Days earlier, Moore had performed an exorcism on Emily, but he was unable to drive the demons from her body—demons who have now finally killed her.
At least that's what he says. The police see it differently: In their eyes, Moore has directly contributed to Emily's death by advising her to stop taking her epilepsy medication and convincing her parents that their daughter's problems were spiritual, not medical. Moore is arrested and charged with negligent homicide. He refuses to make a plea bargain, and thus he, and the entire practice of exorcism, go on trial.
It's the kind of story that could make for a particularly ridiculous episode of any number of legal dramas, but director and co-writer Scott Derrickson takes his material seriously and never resorts to cheap thrills or easy answers. We see the story unfold through the eyes of ambitious lawyer Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), assigned the case because of her success defending a suspect in a notorious murder. Erin is agnostic, but she's also a crafty lawyer, so she builds a case for Moore by setting up demonic possession as a legitimate belief system, one that both Emily and her priest held to strongly and sincerely.
Prosecuting Moore is a devout Christian, Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), who sees exorcism as a barbaric and archaic practice that gives his religion a bad name. He argues that Emily's seizures and hallucinations, which she started experiencing when she left her sheltered small town to go to a large university, were the result of epilepsy and schizophrenia, and that Moore, who was trusted entirely with her care, let her die rather than getting her proper treatment.
Although Derrickson's sympathies clearly lie with Father Moore and the conflicted Erin, he (and Scott) never turns the prosecutor into a sneering villain. Instead, the film presents a balanced portrait in which the right thing is constantly in doubt. As the trial proceeds, we see Emily's ordeal in flashbacks. When Moore and corroborating witnesses describe the action, Emily is clearly possessed—and it's in these scenes that Derrickson turns on the scares, which are intense but almost never over the top. When the prosecution describes the same situations, we see Emily in the throes of mental illness, and understand how both explanations are possible.
In a way, the film puts the whole idea of horror movies on trial. The concept of malevolent supernatural forces seems so much more implausible when explained in the cold light of a courtroom, and the prosecution does its best to poke holes both in the defense's case and the entire foundation of horror movies themselves. As an expert witness testifies about the realities of demonic possession, Scott's prosecutor makes an objection on the grounds of "silliness," which anyone without a tolerance for stories of the supernatural can identify with.
The film ultimately redeems both faith, and its own genre, with an ending that is satisfying but not too pat. Even when Derrickson threatens to veer into clichéd territory, his superb cast keeps things on track. Exorcism is a more serious examination of the intersection of faith and science than any other film in recent memory, and it does an amazing job of not coming down firmly on either side. Even as you feel for the anguished Father Moore, you're never quite sure that he really did the right thing, that Emily couldn't really have been better helped by modern medicine. It's rare that a film tackles religion in such a mature and nuanced way, and it's rarer still that such thoughtfulness is found in a genre that's known more for confirming preconceptions than challenging them.