The Last Exorcism: Part II is dreadfully boring. It ditches the found footage angle and ends up a third-rate Exorcist knock-off that is completely absent of scares. It steers away so aggressively from the few interesting ideas it hints at that you can feel your brain atrophy as the images play in front of you. When it finally embraces an identity of evil fun, the credits are already rolling. What a shame.
(It also has a really stupid name. How could there be another exorcism if the last one was the last one?)
You might be wondering why I even bothered hitting play, let alone suffering through to the ending. I probably wouldn’t have, but it marks an important milestone: This is the first widely-released feature-length film with Damien Chazelle in the credits. He’s listed as one of two writers as well as the story credit. I’ll speculate a bit on his involvement towards the end of this review.
This sequel picks up shortly after the outrageously stupid and batshit closing scene of The (First) Last Exorcism. Nell (Ashley Bell) is the only one to survive the previous film, and she moves to a home for girls and starts seeing a therapist. This flirts with an interesting idea then steers away from it: What, exactly, is the fine line between psychosis and possession? Is there any chance that the events of the first film were actually sexually-repressed hallucination in Nell’s head? But this concept is more quarter-baked than half-baked. But why would we be watching The Last Exorcism 2: This Time It’s Really Last if it was all imaginary?
Across 88 laborious minutes, we watch Nell alternately make progress at normalcy, e.g. get a job and flash some goo-goo eyes at a boy her age, then regress, e.g. have a nightmare where a demon tells her to kill everyone. The biggest setback Nell faces is also the most interesting idea that the movie has: The footage of her bizarre past life, which we recognize as clips from The Last Exorcism, leaks online, and everyone alienates her due to her demonic past.
How I wish that this concept had been the entirety of The Last Exorcism 2: A psychological drama of someone haunted by her demons, whether Satanic or psychotic left ambiguous. The film could have probed someone haunted by a troubling history that figuratively haunts her due to viral fame, blending the concept of demon possession and the inescapable cruelty of internet infamy. But the movie has no sooner introduced the concept of her past life leaking before the idea is trashed and we’ve moved in a totally different direction towards a climax involving… uh, a secret society of witch doctors. Sure, why not!
The only part of the movie that’s really fun is these last ten minutes. This time, when the movie gets loopy, it improves the film, as opposed to the film-torpedoing insanity of the first film’s conclusion. When the demon, Abalam, fully possesses Nell, she goes on a murderous rampage and kicks off a world-burning apocalypse with her evil mind powers. It’s a refreshing change after 85 minutes of unfocused boredom. But we only get about thirty seconds of this before the credits roll. I realize the budget for this wasn’t too high, but if you’re going to tease a super-devil kicking off the Armageddon, at least let us experience some of it!
Bell has a lot more to do as the lead of this film than as the inscrutable specimen of the last film, and she’s mediocre, but not outright bad. At a minimum, she’s never the main problem with the movie: She doesn’t have much coherent material to work with, but she gives it some interiority from moment to moment where I could believe she was a person. There are maybe, like, 4 total moments? When she’s not sure how to play a scene, she defaults back to her standard move: Doe eyed innocence with a half-confused grimace. But, again, it’s not the core of the film’s rot.
Along for the ride this time is Julia Garner, who I am always happy to see. Here she plays a roommate of Nell’s, and she might or might not be a cipher for Abalam. Garner is so much more charismatic and screen-commanding than anyone else here that they probably should have just recast her as Nell. Even if it wouldn’t have made continuity sense, I don’t think too many people would have minded from how much better the final product would be.
Alright, so how about that Chazelle credit? On the surface, it’s extremely bizarre and uncharacteristic of anything he would do in the future. His other non-self-directed writing credit from the same year, Grand Piano, is much more clearly in line with Chazelle’s usual fascination of musicians brought to the brink for the sake of art.
Here’s what we know for sure: Chazelle really doesn’t want to talk about it. Find any career retrospective interview, and he dodges questions on it. All he says is that he doesn’t see too much of what he wrote in the final product, and firmly suggests the reviewer to move to the next question. But this is somewhat incongruous with the actual attribution: Chazelle has both the writing credit and the story credit, meaning that he didn’t just work on a draft, he architected the thing himself.
I read two unsourced articles saying Chazelle sold the film on spec, which is neat if true, but adds even more questions. A spec script means that Chazelle wrote it unprompted and then sold it rather than writing it after being hired for the project. That would imply that this was not a mercenary job that went poorly, but something that he envisioned. One of the unsourced articles says that Chazelle’s reputation right out of school was as a writer first and a director second, and that studios had more interest in getting him to write or touch up scripts than helm a film himself. We see two Chazelle writing-only credits in 2013, so he certainly tested the waters there.
2013 was a busy year for Chazelle: In addition to Last Exorcism 2’s release, he also briefly signed on to direct 10 Cloverfield Lane and directed the Whiplash short film. He dropped out of the director’s chair of the former when the latter helped him find a budget from Blumhouse for his true passion project, the Whiplash feature. Thus, it’s clear that mercenary writing credits were never his endgame.
My generous speculation is that Chazelle wrote and sold a spec for The Last Exorcism: Part 2 which was handed off to a different creative team and totally reworked. Chazelle’s draft (which I’d love to read) might have focused on the more interesting ideas in the film, perhaps creating something more unconventional and non-horror that seemed compelling on paper but that wouldn’t fit as a safe sequel for a known property in actual production, so it was reworked to be more explicitly a horror property.
Whether the hackery is Chazelle’s fault or not, the script is indeed the root of most of the evil in this horrible sequel. If not for the occasional whiffs of creativity, a nice Garner performance, and a fun closing scene, I’d have it at the bottom of the barrel; and even with those, it’s close.
- Review Series: Damien Chazelle
Is It Good?
Not Good (2/8)
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