Hopkins wades through familiar waters in possession thriller. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

The movies have an odd relationship with the calling, and priests and nuns have been the single greatest source for creatively grappling with the ceaseless battle between faith and skepticism since the dawn of the modern picture show. Jews have most often been left to levity and comic relief (insert your favorite Ben Stiller or Woody Allen title here), Buddhists are traditionally mysterious and/or benevolent teachers (The Karate Kid) and Muslims and Christians are currently the preferred heavies (any random action thriller and "enemies within" social drama will do). But Catholics, from The Reaping to Priest to Agnes of God, well, they've been left to do the lion's share of the heavy theoretical lifting, usually brought on by a crisis.

The ideal for of that heavy lifting comes in demonic possession movies, which have seen a bit of a renaissance lately. Possession movies have a clear good and evil angle card to play, and can skirt around more complex issues that can be dragged into religious debate. Put two priests in a scene together-always a novice and a church veteran-and watch the metaphors and allegories fly: faith versus atheism, tradition versus modernity, the soul versus the mind, the master versus the apprentice, and so on and so on. And the possessed? Well, they can be the avatars for just about whatever ails us at any given time. The benchmark for these films, William Friedkin's The Exorcist, had a sweet preteen girl act as stand-in for an entire generation of contrarian hippie types (among, arguably, other things) and none of us would ever look at pea soup the same way ever again. Best of all was that she was absolutely terrifying in the way teens and twenty-somethings were in 1970s America.

The latest is The Rite, whose director Mikael Hafstrom (the underrated Stephen King adaptation, 1408) is an old-fashioned horror filmmaker, almost in the Hammer tradition. Hafstrom has proved he's an adept impersonator of cinematic form, as he did with the espionage romance of Shanghai, but not terribly strong at adding an original spin to them, as was the case with that film as well as the dreadful and derivative noir thriller Derailed. There's nothing flashy about his horror aesthetic-there are plenty of sudden appearances and creepy corridors-and he and writer Michael Petroni (The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader) jettison many of the deconstructionist tendencies from the book The Rite is loosely based upon (so loosely the credit calls it "suggested by") and head straight into Friedkin territory. There is no true consideration of the larger world or of what gives us faith; it's a B chiller at its intermittent best, with Anthony Hopkins bringing the crazy (more on that later) as a master expeller of demons and eventually, perhaps, a victim of one as well.

The story is the same one that's been told in countless demonic possession movies in the past, only this time with far less context. A young priest, Father Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue) is sent to Rome to study possession at the Vatican when he makes an attempt to resign his priesthood. It would seem he's lost his faith, or didn't have enough to begin with. Once there and under the tutelage of Father Xavier (the awesome and under-used Ciaran Hinds), he half-heartedly pays attention and will not be shaken from his beliefs that signs of so-called possession can be explained medically or psychiatrically-the same signs that ironically serve as "proof" the devil is real. The last-ditch effort to turn Kovak into a good Catholic Father comes when his higher-ups (not that high) send him to the unorthodox veteran demon fighter Father Lucas Trevant (Hopkins), where he meets his devout match.

Anyone who's seen the trailers for The Rite will be aware that there is some prime scenery chewing from Hopkins here, and if that's your thing you won't be disappointed. What's most disturbing about that fact is that Hopkins has, for the last two decades, refused to budge from the Hannibal Lecter ditch he's quite comfortably settled into. It's almost as if the actor has left the repressed, proper butler type from The Remains of the Day behind and has defaulted to some version of the wise sociopath since Silence of the Lambs won him an Oscar. He did the same schtick in last year's unintentionally hilarious The Wolfman, and he's doing it again here. Throw in some left-field romance in the form of Angeline (Alice Braga), a journalist in over her head with a vaguely Thorn Birds-y thing for Kovak and the roots of a howler appear.

In all fairness The Rite begins strongly enough, and it's served well by Hafstrom's brand of studied narrative construction. For genre buffs, the brief appearance of Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, The Hitcher) as the undertaker father Michael enters the seminary to escape, is a welcome treat, and the uneasy relationship between the two anchors the film's earliest scenes with a sense of intimate urgency. On top of that a 16-year-old girl in the throes of demonhood pounding against her pregnant stomach presumably to avoid birthing Rosemary's baby is compelling sequence. But by the time Hopkins gets his Lecter on in the final reel the proceedings have spiraled into ludicrousness and there's no going back. Beyond those highlights-if you can call Hopkins' grandiose spitting and sputtering a highlight-The Rite feels too familiar to leave a lasting impression, and it's not nearly spooky enough to be enjoyable on a purely fright fare level. Still, it's better than The Exorcist II: The Heretic. Shudder.

The Rite opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Homage or rip-off, because that's not Max Von Sydow? The silhouette of the lone priest is a must for any film that has followed The Exorcist, this time in The Rite.

(HK Edition 02/26/2011 page4)