Acts of violence happen almost entirely off-camera important lines of dialogue are dubbed and dropped awkwardly into the moments between shots. And while it is fun to see the film gesture towards the long memory of New England towns not far removed from acts of religious violence, the script can never quite marry the compelling pieces of her character design and backstory into a coherent whole.Īlmost everything about The Unholy feels thrown together. The rules surrounding her powers are never established, and this lack of details means that Mary spends most of the movie jumping out at the camera from various surfaces. The creature of Mary is cut from the same cloth as early-2000s horror films like Darkness Falls, a witch whose earthly presence is reduced to CGI and jump scares. But nothing in Spiliotopoulos’ track record as a screenwriter ( Hercules, The Huntsman: Winter’s War) suggests he is prepared to deliver this crunchy of a horror movie, and it does not take long for The Unholy to succumb to its worst instincts. In its best moments, The Unholy touches on the human factors that would allow a miracle to gain traction in modern society. Treating miracles as socioeconomic phenomena – events that bolster the Catholic Church’s reputation among nonbelievers and generate millions of dollars in tourism revenue – is a decidedly different spin on religious horror. As he reminds Gerry, things did not exactly end well for the children of Fatima. Only Sadler’s Father Hagan sees the risk these miracles pose to Alice from a spiritual and historical standpoint. The movie works best when it avoids the horror genre entirely, exploring the institutions that have a vested interest in proving the veracity of Alice’s miracles. One can get an awful lot of mileage out of the right Big Idea in films, and The Unholy spends its first act placing miracles within an intriguingly modern context. So when Fenn has a chance encounter with Alice (Brown), a teenager who claims to speak to the Virgin Mary and performs miracles in her rural community, he's willing to look past a few dangerous omens in search of his big comeback special. Now he travels the countryside, writing articles about alien abductions and satanic rituals for whichever blog will pay his way. Once a rising star in journalism, Fenn lost everything when he was discovered to have fabricated elements of his most important stories. Gerry Fenn ( The Walking Dead's Morgan) has a tricky relationship with the truth. There is something refreshing about watching a studio dump a mediocre horror movie in theaters during the first quarter of the year. Look no further than The Unholy, the directorial debut of long-time screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos. After a year of pandemic living, people are hungry for any signs that things might be getting back to normal.
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