The Devil and Father Amorth (2018)

In 2018 Slant Magazine published a piece on William Friedkin christening the filmmaker the “Auteur of Existential Dread”. A fitting moniker, seeing as Friedkin has openly discussed being fascinated with the balancing act he and fellow humans perform behaving for society versus the impulse to fully lose control. This almost sociological interest of Friedkin's was apparent from his entry into the film industry, the documentary The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) which centered on a death row inmate staring down his own fate. “The thin line between criminal and cop”, as Friedkin calls it, is at the core of films like The French Connection (1971), Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in LA (1985) and Killer Joe (2012) whereas films like Sorcerer (1977), Rampage (1987) and Bug (2006) all feature characters staring into some form of void or succumbing to the madness. The Exorcist (1973) is clearly the most obvious example of the tug-of-war between the light and the darkness that is at the core of so many of Fredkin's films, but it's also a curious film in that Friedkin had never explored that eternal, internal battle in such a literal (or spiritual) way before. It wasn't until The Devil and Father Amorth in 2018 when, stemming from a Vanity Fair article Friedkin had written two years prior, Friedkin returned to the topic of exorcism and the documentary format where his career began.

Until his death in 2016, Father Gabriele Amorth was the Vatican's “Exorcist-in-Chief”, said to have performed the right an innumerable amount of times. Introducing the documentary with the backstory that led to William Peter Blatty writing The Exorcist, Friedkin begins Father Amorth's story, his journey to performing exorcisms and his granting Friedkin permission to film his handiwork. More than a one-note work however, Friedkin presents the footage to and interviews a host of theologians, priests, doctors and psychologists that, along the journey with Friedkin himself, attempt to contextualize the strange phenomena of possession and exorcism.

In a lot of ways, The Devil and Father Amorth is reminiscent of another documentary from a controversial filmmaker focused on the esoteric, Richard Stanley's The Otherworld (2013), in that there's bound to be a large segment of the audience going in with a healthy amount of skepticism. Regardless of religious beliefs, pre-concieved notions of concepts like “God” or “Satan” or “good” and “evil”, The Devil and Father Amorth poses a litany of fascinating and potentially unsettling existential questions that throughout the course of the documentary that various persons of faith, science and medicine ponder and like in Friedkin's fictional narratives, there is a lack of concrete, black and white answers. The exorcism performed by Father Amorth is actually fairly typical of how such acts have been reenacted in various media. Nothing that comes anywhere close to Friedkin's immortal 1973 film, but some of the more common possession symptoms are displayed by “Cristina”, the unfortunate woman feared to be under possession. As noted in the film, the exorcism filmed by Friedkin was actually her ninth go-around with Father Amorth, and later in the documentary Friedkin recounts with great dramatic fervor an incident, not caught on film, an incident in an old village church that put the fear of God and Satan and him. Again, like everything else in the film, the story is open to interpretation but it's another engaging moment in a documentary that, while bound to be dismissed by many, is serious about its subject, Friedkin's connection to it being obvious.

Born and raised Jewish, Friedkin has spent most of his life as an agnostic, though has long stated that he views the New Testament teachings of Jesus as a utilitarian means of going through life, though as seen in the documentary, even among the most faithful there seems to be various personal “levels” of faith. One of the more telling moments in the film comes when Friedkin is taken aback by an admittedly surprising remark from Robert Barron, an Archbishop in Los Angeles, who admits that he would not be able to perform the same tasks as Father Amorth as his faith is not at the same levels as Father Amorth's to confront legitimate evils. Nietzsche's famous abyss quote is also brought to mind by writer Jeffery Burton Russell who warns Friedkin that devoting too much time to researching evil can have a profound and depressing effect on the psyche. As for the skeptics, Friedkin told The Guardian “I’m not interested in convincing you, or anyone else... This is what I saw, and the only way to deal with that conclusion was in this way, getting closure through this film. You’ll have to work that out for yourself.” Ironic that Friedkin would use to word “closure” as many will no doubt walk away from The Devil and Father Amorth without any, though ultimately it's that existential open-endedness that gives Friedkin's work its power.