Russell Crowe’s new film The Pope’s Exorcist has been branded “unreliable splatter” by the International Association of Exorcists (IAE).
In the trailer and other promotional material, the movie claims to be “inspired by the actual files of father Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist of the Vatican”.
“There is actually a real job called the Chief Exorcist in the Vatican,” Crowe explained in the film’s production notes. “Father Gabriele Amorth was a real man who held that office for 36 years, and was involved in tens of thousands of exorcisms.”
However, in a statement issues last month, the IAE, which Amorth himself founded in 1990, described the film as “unreliable splatter cinema” (via The Guardian).
The statement claimed that the film’s plot, which involves a Vatican conspiracy, raised “unacceptable doubt” as to who “the real enemy is, the devil or ecclesiastical power”.
It continued: “The end result is to instil the conviction that exorcism is an abnormal, monstrous, and frightening phenomenon, whose only protagonist is the devil, whose violent reactions can be faced with great difficulty.
“This is the exact opposite of what occurs in the context of exorcism celebrated in the Catholic church in obedience to the directives imparted by it.”
Amorth was president of the IAE until 2000 and died in 2016. He claimed to have performed 160,000 exorcisms in his career.
The IAE said the statement had been released in response to the trailer, and that it would be commenting further following the film’s release on Good Friday (April 7). A second statement has not yet been released.
Before his death in 2016, Amorth agreed to give producer Michael Patrick Kaczmarek optioned the rights to his two memoirs – An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories.
In the film’s production notes, Kaczmarek said: “I was able to convince [Amorth] that if he took the chance to work with me, that I would try to make sure the Catholicity would be preserved in the film – and that he would be respected as a person along with the Church and his religious order.
“My producing partners and I always pitched this as the James Bond of exorcists… The sky was the limit in terms of the number of stories we could tell.”
Elsewhere, Crowe recently admitted that he’s “slightly jealous” of Ridley Scott’s upcoming Gladiator sequel, starring Paul Mescal.
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