[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down]
In Theaters Friday, February 10
An old-fashioned devil haunter with just a touch of Shutter Island thrown in for good measure, Consecration is a grab-bag of horror tropes and cinematic parlor tricks that amuses for a time, yet ultimately stumbles. A harmless and sometimes engaging little trifle about a sister fighting through Crusader curses and staid bureaucracy to get to the bottom of her brother’s death, the film by director Christopher Smith runs out of narrative gas and effective scares well ahead of the finish line.
The central mystery of the picture is concerned with the alleged murder-suicide of a priest by another man of the cloth in a remote, coastal Scottish convent. Eye doctor Grace (Jena Malone) gets the tragic news that her brother was the killer/suicide clergyman in the event and drops everything to travel to Scotland to settle his affairs. Once there, Grace encounters what she suspects is a conspiracy to hide the truth of events, yet she can’t seem to stay conscious long enough to sort out any of it (she faints with alarming regularity).
As Grace digs deeper into not just the mystery of her brother’s work at the convent, but the history of the religious order associated with it, flashbacks from her childhood (and more fainting) round out the story. A local cop (Thoren Ferguson) and the head priest of the convent (Danny Huston) take turns acting as both friend and foe, leading to a bloody finale that gets an A for effort, but is woefully short on gasps and genuine scares. Indeed, throughout Consecration, Smith and the script he co-wrote with Laurie Cook fail to connect the tension of the scenes with any audience investment with the characters, leaving the viewer with a mystery minus a vessel.
This starts with Malone in the lead, whose shaky British accent and perma-wince expression fail to bring the audience along for any of her stress and paranoia. Malone sells the trauma of losing her brother early on, and her insistence that they get to the bottom of what really happened to him is reasonable, but once ancient curses, blood magic, and devil shit start happening, one begins to wonder why this woman doesn’t just get the hell out of there. The movie presumes that the mystery of all of this is enough (for Grace and the audience), yet all the fainting and Vaseline-lens visions do little to deepen the intrigue or encourage investment in the broader enigma.
Even so, there are some interesting ideas in Consecration, including the use of eyes as a recurring thematic and visual motif (Grace’s profession is no coincidence). The film also looks gorgeous, a credit to rookie cinematographers Rob Hart and Shaun Mone, who fill much of the narrative dead air with luscious shots of the remote coast and countryside. The costuming and set design also do convincing work bringing this monastic universe to life within the ruins of what the characters claim to be a thousand-year-old setting, all of which makes the broader story’s failures that much more disappointing.
Without giving anything away, it’s clear early on that Grace and her faintings/flashbacks/visions are the key to solving this mystery, yet the build-up to the ultimate revelation is prefaced by jump-scares that don’t land, inconsequential revelations that fail to sweeten the mystery, and villain-framing that deprives the story of its tension. What’s worse, Grace is often a passenger to all of this rather than a driver of it, which robs the narrative of its momentum. The pacing of Consecration suffers as a result, and by the time the third act rolls around, one begins groping around for more than answers, looking instead for a reason to care.
Huston does his best to hold it all together with his gravitas, and for a little while he succeeds, yet the script is just too boxy and faint-happy to keep any of it interesting or engaging. At its root, Consecration is interested in the ways mankind serves as the flotsam in the battle between good and evil, acting as the collateral damage and debris, yet for all of its roughly 90 minutes, the film fails to establish how or why anyone watching should be invested in any of this. The characters aren’t compelling, the mystery isn’t that interesting, and the scares aren’t all that effective, leaving the film a black eye amongst an alarming shortage of them.
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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