(REVIEW) “The Exorcism” is a beautifully shot and smartly conceived meta-take on the exorcism genre. Unfortunately, instead of developing or paying off its ideas, it abandons them in favor of an unreflective string of the very cliches it spends the rest of the movie deconstructing.

Russell Crowe stars as Anthony Miller, a washed-up actor out of rehab trying to reconnect with his troubled daughter. He starts to unravel while on the set of a horror film, where he plays a troubled exorcist. His daughter has to figure out if he’s simply slipping back into old addictions or if there’s something more sinister at play.

Let’s be real: The idea of an exorcism movie about an actor playing an exorcist in a remake of “The Exorcist” is a great idea. Given the popularity of both metafiction and the exorcist genre, it’s almost a surprise this is the first meta-take on the genre we’ve gotten. Metafiction is nothing new in movies, and certainly nothing new in horror. The entire “Scream” franchise is built around a movie where its characters watch scary movies and the killers are explicitly acting out the tropes of said films. But it’s not just horror. Deadpool in superhero movies, all the self-aware jokes in Disney Princess films like “Tangled,” “Moana” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”

READ: An Apostolic Vision Of ‘The Exorcist’ As Horror Classic Turns 50

There’s a reason metafiction is so popular. Part of it is because, as Bret McCracken points out in the Gospel Coalition piece “Understanding The Metamodern Mood,” we live in a world that wants to embrace the old stories that we enjoy (whether that’s stories told to us by Hollywood or the church), but we also are hyper-embarrassed by that because we believe that they are simply stories that we made up. By having Deadpool point out that he’s embracing a superhero cliche (something known as “lampshading”), we can embrace it without feeling like we’re suckers, falling for a story we should know is just a story. (“The Fall Guy,” a sweet action-romantic comedy played out on the set of people making an action romantic comedy, is a recent movie that does this every five seconds). 

There are a few places where “The Exorcism” embraces its humorous meta side in ways that are truly effective. The beginning shows an actor walking in a scary-looking room, but reading the lines about what he’s supposed to do as a star in a horror film. The director of the film gleefully explains that the movie he’s making “is a psychological drama wrapped in the skin of a horror film.” This self-aware metamodern lampshading is well executed and adds a flavor to exorcism movies that we don’t typically see.

It’s no wonder the film is so meta. “The Exorcism” is directed by the son of the man who played Father Damian Kansas in the original 1973 classic “The Exorcist.” The director also watched his father struggle with addiction (and is also openly gay) like the actor's daughter in “The Exorcism.”

Metafiction also often feels more realistic than regular fiction because it is closer to the reality that we experience every day. We live in a world of detective stories, horror films and superhero movies. If characters in a horror movie never acted like they had seen horror movies, it wouldn’t be more serious than a meta-story, it would be more unrealistic. 

“The Exorcism” shines when it finds the right balance paralleling the human drama of its characters with the exorcism film that they are making, and where the two bleed into or subvert one another. The protagonist is a recovering alcoholic, drug-addicted actor reconnecting with his daughter who’s been kicked out of school for protesting the firing of her lesbian guidance counselor. His addiction maps well onto potential possession. Battling the demon is them battling for their relationship.

What sets “The Exorcism” apart from other horror films is the way it shines a light on, and often skewers, our self-aware attempts to use genre tropes as frameworks for our lives. The director of the film hires Miller to star as the priest with an “irredeemable” past because he sees that as a metaphor for the actor’s own life. He tells Miller this fact to his face, which is the trigger that pushes Miller eventually over the edge. The Catholic priest consultant on the film became a clergyman because his heroes were priests. Miller became an actor because his heroes were actors. He is triggered by the movie’s portrayal of flawed — but heroic — priests because he was abused by one. Lee laughs about how “patriarchal”  and “monarchal” Catholic prayers are. And she has reason to dislike the Catholic story around sexuality, since she is a lesbian.

One of the most interesting uses of metafiction is when movies use it to compare and contrast how we use what we watch and read to interpret the reality we live in (versus the reality of the actual world). “Nope” is a good example of this, where an alien comes to a small town and those who see it immediately interpret it through the lens of the alien invasion movies that they’ve watched — even though it’s less like that then they think it is. When “The Exorcism” leans into these elements of its story, it soars.

The cinematography is a highlight, as it finds that perfect line between an understated camera view and pacing of a social drama and the surreal, almost dreamlike creepy quality of a horror film. The way the shadows slowly, but surely, envelop the scenes and characters makes you feel the way the supposedly fictional narrative of the movie they’re making takes over their real lives.

Unfortunately, if what makes the movie good is the balance between the natural and the supernatural, the third act loses its footing and falls face first into an impressionistic nightmare. Miller begins doing supernatural demonic feats and surviving injuries and people don’t really react to it with any surprise, giving explanations that amount to spiritual mumbo-jumbo. At this point, the film stops being a grounded character study wrapped in believable religious interpretation and starts being a freaky fever dream, with characters acting like cliche horror movie archetypes walking into beautifully shot movie scenes, but without the foot in our world that the rest of the movie kept to. Nobody seems even shocked when it seems definitively proven that demons are real.

There’s nothing wrong with surreal genre fare where the point is the aesthetics rather than explicit commentary. But given the layered depth we started out with, it feels cheap and unsatisfying. The questions about how we balance the reality we live in with the stories that we tell about it to make sense of it — whether that comes from Hollywood or the church — and how many of those stories we buy or don’t, evaporate in a wave of impressionistic genre violence until the movie simply ends with a confession by Miller on forgiveness. It’s a good message, but because the reality of the world has been lost, it feels tacked on.

“The Exorcism” is exclusively in theaters now.

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.