The Last Exorcism comes from German-born director Daniel Stamm. Stamm had previously made one further feature film, also a mockumentary, with A Necessary Death (2008) about a filmmaker trying to elicit someone to commit suicide on camera for his documentary. In both of these mockumentaries, the actors are complete unknowns to add to the sense of authenticity. Stamm also takes the approach begun with The Blair Witch Project of naming almost all of the characters after the actors playing them. The Last Exorcism is produced by Eli Roth, the cult splatter director behind such films as Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005).

The Last Exorcism was an unknown before I sat down to watch it. The approach seemed to be essentially that of taking The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) – a film that tried to convince us that exorcism was a factual phenomenon and the film a dramatization of an incident that had actually occurred – to an even greater level of (pseudo)-realism. (Perhaps even more than Emily Rose, the film that The Last Exorcism reminds of in terms of its set-up is Blackwater Valley Exorcism (2006), which was designed a low-budget copy of Emily Rose, while the film’s swaying between supernatural and psychological explanations reminds of Requiem (2006), which was designed as a riposte to Emily Rose). That said, the only thing the mockumentary approach seems to offer the well worn demonic possession and exorcism genre is the novelty of stylistic approach. However, once one sits down to watch The Last Exorcism, this is anything but what transpires. It seems to set out to constantly subvert everything that one expects of an exorcism film.

As the film opens, we are introduced to Patrick Fabian’s minister. Watching him in the midst of his church, conducting a full flight of holy-rolling charismatic evangelism, you wonder where possible territory the film is taking us into – whether it has abandoned the Catholicism preferred by every exorcism film since The Exorcist (1973) and is taking evangelical Christian nonsense seriously – and especially whether this is a worldview that one is going to have to accept if one is to buy into the film’s reality (as Emily Rose secretly wanted us to do). However, as Marcus is interviewed and we get to know him, it becomes increasingly apparent that he is a charlatan. We first see him, perhaps innocuously, demonstrating the use of magic tricks in his sermons – but then comes a scene where he claims that he could say anything to his flock whereupon we see him proving this by winding a recipe for banana bread into his sermon. Soon after, he starts confessing that he does not believe in exorcism and only does it as a form of therapy to help people who do believe, while also explaining how he continues to do so to provide for his son’s medical bills.

As we start out to travel to Ivanwood, we have reached the point where Patrick Fabian announces that he is going to conduct the exorcism to prove that such phenomena do not exist. This goes waaaaay beyond Jason Miller in The Exorcist – a priest who was struggling to believe again because he had lost his faith to a priest who has lost his faith long ago but has been continuing to practice exorcisms as a scam for money. Where Jason Miller wanted it to be true, Patrick Fabian’s priest sets out to assiduously disprove the reality of it. This however does not prepare us for what we get when it comes to the actual exorcism. There is a scene where Patrick Fabian gets everybody to close their eyes and pray over Ashley Bell and suddenly the pan of water that her feet have been placed in starts to boil. We are astounded by this as the last thing we expect given such a lead-up is an apparent manifestation. When Caleb Landry Jones accuses Patrick Fabian of faking it afterwards, we are not sure whether we believe this or not – we did see Fabian put something in his pocket and maybe reach in just before praying but both shots were so brief we cannot be sure what we saw. However, in the next scene, we are flabbergasted as we see Fabian in Ashley Bell’s bedroom, hooking up wires and then testing the posts of her bed while commenting “This’ll shake nicely.” The exorcism is intercut with scenes where we see Patrick Fabian preparing his magic tricks – batteries and wires that run down his sleeve to deliver electric shocks via his rings, hidden noise recorders to project the sounds of animal-like roars, even a crucifix with a chemical hidden in the back that causes it to start smoking.

A character like this comes with a predictable arc where you can see that they are being set up to be faced with the actuality of what they are pretending is true. Even here, the film is constantly confounding expectation. Predictably, Patrick Fabian is dragged back in again after he leaves. There he is in the amusing situation of having to deal with a real rather than faked outbreak of phenomena and the exact opposite position he was in earlier where he was defending it as real but is now rigorously declaiming everything as being down to psychological behaviour. With black regard, we see the things that Fabian has insisted earlier being revisited on him – when mention of the pregnancy comes up, Louis Herthum immediately believes it was the demon that Fabian claimed was defiling Ashley Bell and reaches for his shotgun. Right up until the very end, the film keeps doing the old The X Files (1993-2002) trick of vying between paranormal and purely mundane explanations for things. The film sits ambiguously between these dual explanations, although contrary to expectation there is never any scene where Patrick Fabian changes his mind and realizes that he was wrong. The only part that did not work for me [PLOT SPOILERS] is the ending, which seems to contradict the expectations that Ashley Bell is demonically possessed and introduces a left field element about a Satanic conspiracy where I am afraid I did not fully understand how this related to or explained Ashley’s apparently possessed behaviour.

I was amazed at The Last Exorcism. I went in with unsure expectations and found a film that kept one off edge with a constant series of twists, turns and surprises. Daniel Stamm creates an enormous degree of spooky tension out of the mockumentary approach – far more so than one would have thought possible. In the last third, Stamm creates some genuinely unnerving manifestations with Ashley Bell simply standing in the hallway, crouched or hiding on top of cupboards, leading to a disturbing scene in the barn where Patrick Fabian attempts a second exorcism and confronts the force inside her as it twists and torments her body while taunting his disbelief.

The performances in the film are all completely convincing. Patrick Fabian nails the snake oil salesman charisma of a rural preacher extremely well, yet at the same time does the difficult job of remaining openly guileless and the sympathetic force of the show. Ashley Bell conjures a perfect vision of unworldwise backwoods innocence. As the brother, Caleb Landry Jones gives an alarmingly mercurial performance where you are not sure where he is coming from one moment to the next. The scene near the beginning where he gives directions and then abruptly tells them to leave, before he starts throwing things at the vehicle, holds a considerable jolt that forebodes much for what is to come.

(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2010 list. Winner for Best Actor (Patrick Fabian), Nominee for Best Original Screenplay at this site’s Best of 2010 Awards).