farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The medical examiner is called to a bizarre scene: A grieving family, a sheriff's deputy, a priest. In the upstairs bedroom, the emaciated body of a young girl. Did she die of natural causes? It doesn't look that way. "Father," the deputy tells the priest, Father Richard Moore (Wilkinson). "You'll have to come with me."
Moore is the last man to have seen troubled Emily Rose (Carpenter) alive. The district attorney, Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), a self-described man of faith, charges him with negligent homicide.
Rising-star defense attorney Erin Bruner (Linney), meanwhile, is eager for a case that will propel her into full partnership in the firm run by Karl Gunderson (Colm Feore). Gunderson has just the thing: The Catholic archdiocese, a major client, wants her to take on Father Moore's case. Her job: Get him to accept a plea and avoid a public trial that will embarrass the archdiocese. The reason? Moore is saying that Emily Rose was possessed by the devil, and that she died in the course of an exorcism.
Bruner, an agnostic, visits Moore in jail. He won't take the deal. He wants to take the stand to tell Emily's story, and he won't take Bruner on as his lawyer unless she agrees. Fearful of losing the case, Bruner consents.
As the trial begins, Bruner realizes the prosecution has a strong case. Emily, a sheltered young girl, began experiencing horrifying visions after she left home for college. Then came seizures that wracked her body. She suffered from a combination of psychosis and epilepsy, and given proper treatment, might have lived, the prosecution contends. But Father Moore convinced her to go off her meds, leading to her death.
But Moore tells Bruner it wasn't disease. Demons were invading her body. She came to him for help, and it was the failure of the exorcism that caused her death. And Moore tells Bruner something else: Be careful. The dark forces are now after you, too.
A horror-courtroom melange
Judged from the marketing campaign, The Exorcism of Emily Rose would seem to be yet another in a long line of demon-possession movies, a la Exorcist: The Beginning. But viewers expecting spinning heads and pea-soup vomit will be sorely disappointed. Emily Rose is less a supernatural horror movie than a thoughtful, if sometimes ponderous, dramatic exploration of faith and doubt.
There are a few shocks of the cat-jumping-out-of-the-closet variety, but the movie seems more interested in building a sense of creeping dread. It is only fitfully successful at this, and the scares are pretty tame. Lots of portentous images of snowy fields and dreary farmhouses don't necessarily add up to creepiness.
Derrickson, who previously helmed Hellraiser: Inferno, instead seems intent on making an earnest, even-handed movie. Too earnest and even-handed, as it turns out. Every time the film jumps back to the courtroom, the movie stops dead in its tracks, becoming an episode of Law & Order with better production values. And, in a movie about murder and demonic possession, it seems curious that the filmmakers have taken such pains to remain so bloodlessly neutral.
The movie becomes more spirited when it flashes back to Emily Rose's possession experiences. Carpenter, a relative newcomer (her only previous film credit is the execrable White Chicks), literally throws herself body and soul into the role of the beleaguered Rose, contorting her torso inhumanly, barking and screaming like a hound from hell. She is also very convincing as a young woman possessed by ungovernable fears, if not the devil himself, and the movie wouldn't be half as good as it is without her.
The rest of the cast are impressive, doing what they can to breathe a little life into characters who are more opposing points of view than real people.
