His careless act unleashes the spirit, which possesses Alice (first-timer Cricket Brown), the deaf and mute niece of Father Hagan (William Sadler), whose church is adjacent to the tree. Watch Video: 'The Unholy' Trailer Offers Sinister Horror Take on Faith-Based Films (Yes, this is another movie where witch-burners are portrayed as correct and virtuous rather than the fanatical misogynists that history has shown them to be.) The woman’s spirit is captured in the body of a doll that is left at the bottom of the tree so that disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) can find it in the modern day and crush it in order to instigate a phony story he’s writing about cattle mutilations for a dodgy website. She’s accused of being possessed, then nailed to a tree and set on fire. The film’s opening sequence, set in 19th-century Massachusetts, offers a woman’s POV. On top of that, it’s a PG-13 horror movie, which takes excessive gore off the table, pushing the director (in this case, screenwriting-vet-turned-debut-director Evan Spiliotopolous) to replace it with lukewarm jump scares. You’ve seen this one before, countless times, with its superhero priests and seemingly omnipotent spirits who are somehow powerless against containment prayers and quick-thinking investigative journalists. Best left to the younger crowds who are best stimulated through their eyes and not their mind, The Unholy should serve as their repentance.There’s the germ of a provocative idea in “The Unholy” - namely, what if you took a religious-visitation movie like “The Song of Bernadette” or “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” and turned it into a horror movie? Had the film bothered, or dared, to pursue that notion to the fullest, “The Unholy” might be something other than the standard-issue, priests-versus-demonic-spirits thriller that it is. Sporting a laughable Boston accent, Elwes feels as if he’s in a parody of a horror film, which, in all fairness, he might have assumed The Unholy was, given how distinctly un-scary proceedings here truly are.įeeling more like a product that would’ve felt at home in the mid-2000’s when tween-friendly horror was something of a craze, The Unholy can’t help but have its tame indifference all the more highlighted due to the fact that the genre itself has taken such leaps ahead in showcasing the genuine terror and intelligence that’s possible.

Next to the trying Morgan and the suitable Brown, William Sadler (as a local priest) and Katie Aselton (as a doctor who befriends Fenn) provide serviceable work, not entirely embarrassing themselves in the process, with the same unable to be said about Cary Elwes’s appearance as a Bishop brought in to determine whether or not Alice’s claims are legitimate.

It’s a shame that by the time said sinister spirit is wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting townsfolk, the film has failed to truly captivate, so we ultimately don’t really care about what’s unfolding on screen. It isn’t long before Alice’s claims come under suspicion though, with an ominous presence making itself known throughout that pushes Gerry to investigate the town’s history a little further, resulting in some typical dialogue about good and evil and CGI-enhanced jump scares that are insultingly tame credit where it’s due though, The Unholy does offer up some frightfully impressive designs when it comes to the reveal of the sinister spirit at hand. For a town driven so drastically by faith, Alice’s supposed power is immediately responded to in a God-like fashion, and visiting journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, doing the best he can with a tired script) sees this as an opportunity to advance his career, and not being a man of faith means if he believes it that it has to have some merit. What’s even more frustrating is that The Unholy is actually working with a premise ripe with potential, one that centres around a small New England town and the supposed Holy intervention that has caused a deaf girl, Alice (Cricket Brown), to suddenly be able to hear and speak.Īlice is claiming she has seen visions of the Virgin Mary and that she is being used as a vessel to spread the good word and perform her own small miracles. Sadly for writer/director Evan Spiliotopoulos, The Unholy practically checks off every box of genre cliches throughout its 99 minute running time that audiences could practically foretell what’s going to take place before they even set inside a theatre. One thing filmmakers never want their film to be considered is predictable.

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