In exorcist movies, there is never much new under the black hole sun. The one development in the genre over the last decade has been to see it merge, on occasion, with the haunted-house film — a comfortable enough mashup, though it’s kind of like pairing two pop stars to create a hit single out of their combined demos. If the head-spinning success of “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” (2005), and the resurgence of the exorcist film that it inspired, proved anything, it’s that the tropes of demonic possession — the young victims tied to their beds, their faces gray-blue and mottled with sores; the tauntingly blasphemous devil voice that sounds like Darth Vader as the announcer at a strip club; the priests brandishing their tiny crosses and spewing their “Cast thee out!” liturgical spells — have become the horror equivalent of classic rock. They’re the golden oldies that never change, because no one wants them to change. After all, that’s what ties these films to the original box-office DNA of “The Exorcist.The Seventh Day 2021 Movie Download.
In “The Seventh Day,” though, there’s a hint of an innovation, even if it’s not about the devil. It’s about the figure who’s fighting him. Guy Pearce plays Father Peter, a fabled exorcist whose initiation happened on Oct. 8, 1985, the day Pope John Paul II arrived in the U.S. That day, Father Peter assisted in his first exorcism — and saw his mentor, Father Louis (played by the always magnetic Keith David), get stabbed in the neck by a flying crucifix, at which point Father Peter took over and watched his boy victim burst into flames and die. That’s about as bad as it gets in demon fighting. And Father Peter has been making up for it ever since.
The thing is, he doesn’t bear that burden like a heavy cross. He flaunts it like an existential curse that has liberated him from having to act like a priest. As Pearce plays Father Peter, he’s a new screen type: the exorcist as hipster, as cool-cat cowboy, as ballbuster.