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Delivering a guilty pleasure

Edgar Ramirez and Eric Bana. Picture: Supplied

FILM
Deliver Us Fm Evil (MA)
3 stars
Eric Bana, Edgar Ramirez
DIRECTOR SCOTT DERRICKSON

REVIEW PIP CHRISTMASS

At first glance it might seem odd that Eric Bana - he of Chopper, Black Hawk Down and Troy fame - would agree to star in a genre film about demonic possession.

But before you whisper the words "career in decline", this particular genre film is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and its director Scott Derrickson, whose previous supernatural thriller Sinister convinced Bana to take on the role, has just landed Marvel's new outing Doctor Strange. So you're not exactly looking at some low-budget splatter flick.

Deliver Us from Evil opens with three soldiers in Iraq, circa 2010, who enter an underground cave and come up against something unspeakable - although it takes quite some time for us to discover what that thing is. The story then skips forward to New York, 2013. Classic tough-guy cop Ralph Sarchie (played by Bana with a respectable Noo Joisey accent) has the unpalatable task of trying to resuscitate a baby whose lifeless body has been thrown into a dumpster, an early indication of the terrible things he has to see and do on the job.

Of course, nothing comes close to what he's about to come up against: the devil incarnate. Sarchie and his sidekick, Butler (Joel McHale), are called out to investigate a bizarre incident in which a woman, Claudia (Valentina Rendon), appears to have dropped her own child into a lion's den at the Bronx Zoo. When these two seen-it-all- before cops arrest Claudia apparently speaking in tongues, they assume she is severely mentally disturbed - until an unconventional priest, Father Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez) barges into the lockup to suggest they are actually dealing with a case of demonic possession.

The first hour of Deliver Us from Evil is absolutely riddled with horror cliches. It's filmed in a relentlessly dark, grimy, eerie world where daylight barely breaks through. All the usual scaremongering tactics are there (loud, unexpected noises; creepy music; hissing cats; slithering snakes; you name it, if it's a phobia, Derrickson manages to throw it in).

But in the film's second half, I admit I stopped rolling my eyes and started to become rather intrigued by the story that was unfolding.

There's plenty of blood and violence but Deliver Us from Evil refuses to be just a stock-standard supernatural horror flick. It has just a little more meat on its bones, because it's also partly a procedural cop thriller, and in an attempt to keep things slightly believable, there's even some marital relationship drama thrown in for good measure.

It's nothing new, really - overworked cop barely has time for his wife (Olivia Munn) and kids, and is incapable of openly discussing the grim realities of his working day.

But it provides an interesting counterpoint to all the really creepy stuff, grounding the narrative so that even the most acerbic of sceptics might begin to wonder if all this possession stuff really is possible.

If the film often comes off as cliched, it is without question suspenseful, and if that's Derrickson's major aim, he's done a great job.

Although there's no projectile vomiting here or heads rotating 360 degrees, Rendon gives The Exorcist's Linda Blair a run for her money, while Sean Harris, as her malevolent mentor Santino, is just about the most terrifying-looking psychopath you're likely to see on screen.

Bana is solid and engaging as Sarchie but it's really Ramirez's intense turn as Mendoza that provides the deeper fascination (he's a converted drug addict who impregnated a fellow addict before converting to the path of righteousness).

There's a well-played central scene in which Sarchie and Mendoza discuss God and the problem of evil, and Mendoza describes the theory of primary evil - the work of the devil - and secondary evil - the bad things that men do.

The film also touches on war-induced post-traumatic stress, definitions of mental illness, and the meaning of religious faith, albeit in the most perfunctory ways. But if you allow yourself to accept the innumerable cliches that accompany this particular genre - the Horror 101 element, if you like - and give yourself up to it, Deliver Us from Evil turns out to be a surprisingly guilty pleasure.