For a while, writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos’s The Unholy gets by on the charisma of Jeffrey Dean Morgan. As Gerry Fenn, the actor plays a Hollywood specialty: the disgraced, cynical reporter with a drinking problem who stumbles into a story that could reinvigorate his career. With his large, angular frame and requisite bad-boy facial stubble, Morgan bears a bit of a resemblance here to Anthony Bourdain, emitting a similar kind of erudite yet streetwise electricity. Morgan’s stardom has been long overdue, and it’s refreshing to see him in the center ring, even in a film that appears to be attempting to fuse Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole with one of James Wan’s, well, wan shockers.
Fenn is covering a livestock story in Massachusetts when he discovers a creepy doll near an even creepier tree that’s been imported more or less straight from Wan’s The Conjuring. Fenn is told that to break the doll is to potentially unleash an evil entity, which he promptly does in order to goose his story with an occult angle. Not long afterward, a deaf woman, Alice (Cricket Brown), arises from a pew in a nearby church, approaches the tree, and begins to hear and speak, preaching of a vision of the Virgin Mary and the miracles she’ll perform. Then Alice cures a boy’s paralysis in front of an astonished crowd, and Fenn finds himself in the midst of a potentially historic scoop. By this point, you may wonder if Alice is being approached by Mary or something more sinister, and if this premise exists solely for Fenn to rediscover his scruples and tell the truth at the right time, prioritizing ghostbusting over a cushy new editorial job.
Fenn’s pro forma personal growth is, unfortunately, more of a concern to Spiliotopoulos than scaring the audience, or capitalizing on the luridly sacrilegious implications of his premise. After an atmospheric opening, The Unholy reveals itself to be profoundly timid and incurious. The possibility that the miracles can be undone by banishing the embittered demon at their center is broached but never actually dramatized—a Faustian conflict that could’ve been the source of pathos. Correspondingly, the Vatican’s need to cover up the true nature of the miracles could have been a source of satire that’s particularly resonant given the endless controversies of the Catholic Church, though this potentiality is also whiffed, save for Cary Elwes’s amusingly slimy performance as a bishop. Instead, Spiliotopoulos mostly has Fenn and Dr. Natalie Gates (Katie Aselton) investigate an obvious mystery while playing whack-a-mole with a CGI ghoulie that appears to have been imported from Wan’s The Conjuring 2.
The Unholy also inherits from The Conjuring series, and from too many other horror films, a weird and unseemly need to valorize the church as a combatant against various evils that scan as symbols of oppressed communities. The Catholic Church is often a hero in the horror genre, even though “witch hunting,” often conducted by the agents of the church itself, was an act of prolonged hysteria and terrorism against women. Why do so few horror films ever seek to empathize with the terror of the women being burned at the stake or drowned? The demon at the center of The Unholy was once a similarly persecuted woman, and it has a reason to yearn for vengeance, yet the film doesn’t seem to understand this irony. Instead, the demon is offered up here, as it usually is in this sort of paranormal hokum, as pure, unchallenging-to-the-viewer evil, while the real evil of the Salem witch trials remains unindicted.
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