Sarchie’s emotional purge, prefaced with a half-hearted apology for having screamed at his six-year-old daughter for running around excitedly during the throes of a sugar rush, is made haunting by the customarily nuanced Bana, who appears to understand his character’s turmoil as a form of PTSD. The story, at once overstuffed and undernourished, hits a raw nerve early when Sarchie explains to his wife, Jen (Olivia Munn), the horrors he’s witnessed on the job in one week’s time, from finding a dead baby in a dumpster to arresting a woman at the Bronx Zoo for nearly feeding her toddler to the lions. Though there’s no sense of the enemy having retreated inside, the Americans enter nonetheless, and amid the relics (skulls, hieroglyphics) of a past that has been rendered using the cheapest of B-movie brushes (the walls of the tomb seem as sturdy as Rice Krispies Treats), an evil force possesses the men, warping their camouflaged visages into spitting images of the mighty Pazuzu and sending them back to New York City as parkour-ing Banksy impersonators. The film’s nearly incoherent prologue, set in 2010, has American troops descending upon their faceless enemy in a landscape that suggests a curious gene splice of desert and forest, snakes and bats and hyenas wreaking noisy havoc all about as a sudden explosion reveals the entrance to a catacomb. Just as the war vet’s dramatic exit is seemingly in homage to Jason Miller’s famous nosedive at the end of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Deliver Us from Evil begins by locating the source of its titular evil in the ancient, subterranean bowels of Iraq.
But if the film, like Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose before it, isn’t some didactic shouting match between religious and secularist forces, it shouts in other ways-mostly as an unrefined litany of mansplaining which borrows more than a few notes from the granddaddy of all exorcism movies. The man’s rage and degradation are so freakishly visceral, so seemingly irrevocably pollutant, that they cast away all doubt about whether or not this will be just another tall tale about the veracity of possession by malevolent spirits. In one intensely jolting scene from his new film, Deliver Us from Evil, an Iraq war veteran suddenly lunges at New York City police officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) before scurrying away like some wild animal on his hands and knees, throwing himself through a second-floor window and disappearing into the dead of night. A jump scare isn’t just a jump scare in the films of Scott Derrickson, which isn’t to say this wannabe master of horror has entirely perfected the art of sudden dread.
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