Director: Christopher Smith
Writers: Christopher Smith, Laurie Cook
Stars: Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Will Keen
Synopsis: After the alleged suicide of her priest brother, Grace travels to the remote Scottish convent where he fell to his death. Distrusting the Church’s account, she uncovers murder, sacrilege and a disturbing truth about herself.
Non-believer Grace (Jenna Malone) travels to an isolated Scottish convent for answers upon the suspicious death of her priestly brother – leading to warped discoveries about Grace’s own past, more disturbing deaths, and rituals to contain the evil responsible in director Christopher Smith’s (Black Death) 2023 nunsploitation thriller, Consecration.
Unfortunately, Consecration gets off on the wrong foot thanks to opening narrations about guardian angels, ophthalmology bad news, and home alone ominous with flickering lights, rattling walls, and a figure in the hallway that makes viewers wonder where this is all going. The police phone with news about the murder-suicide, but Grace insists her faithful brother would not kill himself or anyone else. His extreme fire and brimstone order, however, has nuns seeing the devil and cutting out their eyes while the Mother Superior claims a demon is responsible. Local inspectors are worried about treading lightly in Vatican jurisdiction, but Grace defies the police tape across the abbey ruins and goes to the rocky shoals where the bodies were found for herself before coroner examinations and visions of the deceased. Again the audience’s attention is drawn to why incoherent fainting spells and other’s arguments outside Grace’s point of view are supposed to be significant amid meandering flashes of past warnings, childhood memories of masks and stone circles, and medieval dreams of knights on horseback.
Explanations about her mother being dead and her father being in prison for having killed her mother are better to the point than unnecessary phone calls to her doctor mentor, and Grace sees the cliffside ruins restored with plummeting initiates in white. The nuns say the battle between God and Satan is more important than what’s considered a crime, but brief existential interrogations cut away to reflections that aren’t there, Grace’s nonsensical playing detective, and her brother’s phantom voiceovers about how special she is. She explains his journal is written in their childhood code, saying that he discovered the convent previously tried to adopt them – yet the viewer never saw this research amid numerous walking around the chapel exposition scenes and a nun popping up to say peekaboo. Convenient flashes within flashes and dream transitions happen as rumors of knightly treasures and earthquakes revealing secret crypts are tossed on top of the brotherly MacGuffins. Trips to the dark basement for more contrived visions, violence inducing car accidents, and reading montages of mystical tomes; of course written in their childhood code. Talk of bumping bellies with a dirty man once and seeing visions of black snakes with him lead to slit wrist suicides so the sin will leave you, yet Consecration has no real religious horror or church commentary. A humorous one eyed nun trying to stab people compounds the inexplicable, largely absent inspectors and insufferable characterizations as realizations the audience already knew happen instantly for those now humble and willing to be cleansed. The ineffectual police finally bother to do something but the nuns so active in the crowd surfing ritual minutes before, cower as the evil whooshes and cool flashes show how it was all done complete with blind patients healed by evil and a gun toting nun hit by a car. Unlike Christopher Smith’s most impressive Triangle, the cockeyed Interstellar twists here are reduced to embarrassing silliness.
Father Danny Huston (The Proposition) is called in from The Vatican to investigate but he has two sins: cake and coffee. Though obviously a seemingly ominous figure with young nuns scurrying away in his wake, Father Romero appears reasonable, willingly sharing church history and admitting that the lack of transparency is a constant stain on the institution. He offers Grace their full support and cooperation yet shouts at the nuns in Latin that it is God, then him, in that order, and he will decide Grace’s fate. Romero admonishes creepy Mother Superior Janet Suzman (Nicholas and Alexandra) for trying to fool police and attacking Grace when they need to gain her trust. While there he’s to reconsecrate the grounds, but Father Romero says they’re better off getting rid of all the relics and rumors that give the church a bad reputation – and he’ll do what must be done. It’s more humorous than sinister, however, that he has to shoo away the one eyed nun who’s always underfoot, and our Mother Superior gets more pissy with Grace’s every objection. She runs a harsh regime because we must face the devil and the darkness lest we come under his grip, but what could have been an interesting theological debate grows laughable as our Mother meddles with the police and chants in her jail cell while the peekaboo nun sings.
Forced to dress in their novice white, Grace stomps about the crosses and statuary shouting, for as a woman of science, she doesn’t believe in miracles or backward steps to forgive sins. Jena Malone (Love Lies Bleeding) has an uphill battle as our kind of/sort of doctor cum amateur investigator. She refuses to accept the circumstances of her brother’s death, doesn’t believe in demons, and won’t apologize for her know it all behavior. Grace demands no one pray for her and intrudes upon the convent for an explanation even when told the twelfth century church history. It’s apparent to the audience almost immediately why Grace is so unlikable, and we have no sympathy as the deaths around her escalate. She still wears the white habit when she goes to see her dad in prison, and this scene should have come much sooner upon learning of her brother’s death, perhaps opening the film. Unlike all the flashbacks, the backstory is compelling here. Her dad says she is the devil, asking her what it’s like to bring death everywhere she goes. He caged Grace so she could do no harm, but Grace still doesn’t consider she may be the problem, and therein is what’s wrong with Consecration.
This scene is the core of the story, and the rest of the movie is padding while Grace gets a clue. The nuns lay her on the chapel floor in their absolution ritual as the film unravels further by intercutting everything at once, tying Grace’s entire story from medieval times to being found on the beach wet and looping back to the beginning – hitting the viewer over the head too many times with what we already easily deduced. Because of the unintended humor, Consecration also lacks a certain gothic, ecclesiastic atmosphere with no sense of the ancient good versus evil despite the arches, robes, and chapels. Brief daytime scenes of nuns in white hoods going in circles while singing in Latin lend an inkling of the weird and medieval, however the poorly lit dark filming and contemporary blue gradient negates the Isle of Skye ruins and rustic Scottish locales. When pausing at one point, the screen looked entirely black; tight camera shots and frustrating, tough to see scenes make Consecration feel rushed and low budget. The distorted, fuzzy point of view haze and darkness manifested coloring may be a deliberate metaphor, but we aren’t always in the same viewpoint, calling the audience’s attention to how we would structure the picture differently. Despite lengthy end credits meaning this is less than its listed ninety minutes, Consecration is over long, going round and round in a surprisingly insipid mess with inexplicable editing and poor narrative flow exacerbating the windblown story.
Grade: F
Please see my much more positive review of Christopher Smith’s The Banishing
