Deliver Us From Evil (2014)
Arriving on home video just in time for Halloween, Scott Derrickson's "Deliver Us From Evil" delivers a creative tangle of tropes and trippy special effects, aiming to do better than merely making us jump out of our seats. And it succeeds.
This year, I’ve seen two priests on the big screen. Both have marched solemnly toward a showdown with evil.
That evil takes two very different forms — a human being with a gun and a grudge, and a demon using a broken human being as his vessel.
Yes, these two films are altogether different experiences. But both deal cleverly, even subversively, with a variety of genre conventions (one’s a scenic, small-town, Masterpiece Mystery-type production; the other is a grim, big-city police procedural). Both present priests who are admirable men who can crumble if their weaknesses are exploited. Both are unusually sincere at heart. And both include far more interesting and complex depictions of faith than the preachy mediocrity that is typically categorized as a “Christian movie.”
I haven’t found the time yet to give an in-depth review of Calvary — the whodunit, or rather, the who’s-gonna-do-it — but here are some revealing responses from critics I regularly read.
Deliver Us From Evil — which arrives on home video just in time for Halloween — is a police procedural driven by the obsessions of my favorite current scare-master, Scott Derrickson. Tricked out with wild special effects, Deliver Us follows a cop who, skeptical about Satan, teams up with a Catholic priest in order to track a serial killer: a villain whose methods defy rational explanations, and who may not even be human.
Let’s take a closer look at that one. I saw Deliver Us From Evil last July, and I’ve been thinking about ever since.