Thoughts on The Cleansing Hour (2021) [005]
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Spoilers for the entire film.
I recently watched The Cleansing Hour (2021), a decent scary horror flick. The premise: best friends Max and Drew run a fake exorcism show/live-stream for the profits... and the followers. But when an actor fails to show, Drew convinces his fiancée Lane to sub in as the possession victim--only for her to fall prey to a real demonic possession. The show gets much too real as Max, Drew, and even Lane battle it out against an evil ready to bring hellfire to a worldwide audience.
Alix Angelis, who plays Lane, must've had a hell of a fun time playing sweet, sour, and scared, while Tara Karsian as Lane's voice when she's possessed was frighteningly good. Ryan Guzman's great as the charismatic 'Father' Max, a selfish and self-centered guy who's also desperately searching for connection and meaning, while Kyle Gallner's endearing as Drew, the put-upon best friend who has his own scummy secrets and good hearted loyalty. As someone lucky enough to still keep in touch with several childhood friends, I'm primed to enjoy stories about decades-long friendship, so the ups and downs of Max and Drew's partnership over the film quite worked for me, while Drew and Lane's relationship was a likeable contrast and provided another layer of investment. I'm also, at least based on what I've been watching lately, a fan of stories about characters are trapped in a place and having to deal with interpersonal drama/supernatural horrors, which The Cleansing Hour delivers in spades.
I also enjoyed the ideas the movie played with: real vs fake in the premise of "The Cleansing Hour" show, which intersected with Max and Drew's disillusionment with the Catholic church and Max's sharp despair at the hypocrisy running through the whole institution, plus the demon's pressuring of Max, Drew (and eventually Lane!) to reveal their secrets as a dark mirror of confession; and not only the lure of using social media to get yourself money, attention, and prestige, with Max in particular trying and failing to nurture genuine human connection in the people he meets because of his show, but world-wide media as a vector to spread hate, violence, and chaos at an unprecedented scale. The devil using a livestream to hypnotize millions worldwide & command them to kill: some very on the nose commentary about the ubiquity of the internet & the messages we hear on it. Weird to think when I was a kid, it might've felt like an over the top horror-movie ending, but now it feels a little too real.
Overall, a recommend if you like social media commentary, friendship dramas, and/or supernatural/exorcism movies.
I did have two minor frustrations, though.
First, when the characters were speaking Spanish in the very first scene, the subtitles just said "speaking Spanish," without any translation or even the lines just verbatim. At least it wasn't the generic "speaking foreign language" -- which of course begs the question, foreign to whom? The scene works well enough without being able to understand what's being said, but the lack of translation was a moment of glaring institutional racism and something so easily fixed by just adding the Spanish lines into the subtitles.
Second, there were two flashbacks/callbacks that were entirely unnecessary. Being generous, both read as studio mandates and not something within the original script. These two moments worked just fine -- frankly, worked better -- without the flashbacks/callbacks, and they stuck out given that the script overall treated its audience with a level of respect that, yes, we could remember a scene that happened just over an hour ago. I actually watched a youtube vid on this phenomenon a little while ago, "phone addiction is making movies dumber." by Amelia McCluskey, and she describes almost the exactly same type of unnecessary flashback/callback in the movie Sinners. She argues it's a part of the second screen phenomenon, or people using their phones/tablets/doing something else while watching movies or TV and so relying on dialogue to understand what's going on, leading to movies and shows having more and more "explain to the audience" moments that are very jarring for someone purely just watching. My hope would be this kind of writing is a short-lived thing, but given that people are apparently scrolling on their phones in movie theaters now (?!?), I wouldn't put my money on it.
Third and final thing: I've been slowly working my way through Kyle Gallner's filmography, with this movie being the 2nd one I've written about (Strange Darling being the first). Planning to add my thoughts on more movies soon.
Until next time & wishing you ease,
Cordelia