After watching The Keep a film with a troubled production I followed up the next feature film with a movie that possessed and even more troubled history Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

1973 saw the release of The Exorcist adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, directed by William Friedkin, and a massive box-office smash, launching a troubled franchise of horror movies. Four years after the original Exorcist II: The Heretic failed to reproduce the first film’s success and the franchise lay fallow for 13 years until Blatty, ignoring the sequel, write and directed one of his own, The Exorcist III. (While Blatty pretended the second one didn’t exist the studio pointedly did not.) This film also failed to find the level of success desired by the studio.

More than a decade passed before Paul Schrader was brought aboard to help a prequel for the backstory on the original films exorcist Father Lankester Merrin. Schrader’s film so disappointed the studio that he was fired from the production, twelve weeks of additional shooting and with an almost entirely new cast and a new director, Renny Harlin, a new film with more violence, gore, and jump scares was crafter and released as The Exorcist: The Beginning, which failed with both audiences and critics. Seeking to salvage something from the plane crash of a production, the studio brought Schrader back to the film and provided funds to allow him to complete his vision which was released and also failed as Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

Father Merrin, (Stellan Skarsgard) after witnessing and being forced to participate in Nazi atrocities in his native Holland in his post-war and devoid of faith, now focusing on archelogy, is excavating a buried 5th century church in Kenya, an important find as the first evidence that the early Christian Church had reached this part of the world so early. The Turkana locals, predominantly non-Christian, view the church as a source of evil. A British garrison is posted to protect the site from looters escalating tension with the locals. Merrin discovers the church, which anomalous architecture was built atop an older non-Christian site of worship where human sacrifices were performed. After unsealing the hidden site, the hostility between the British occupiers and the locals intensifies carrying echoes of the war crimes in Merrin’s past. The local missionary, Father Francis, believes an evil spirit has been released but Merrin’s lack faith forces him to find ‘rational’ explanations for the strange events. With war brewing and people torments by their haunted terrible pasts, Merrin is forced to confront the facts of his belief and find his faith again if the unearthed evil is to be vanquished.

What Works For Me:

There’s a lot in this film that is aimed at my particular tastes in horror movies. I am more partial to atmosphere and mood with a slow burn in horror than I am to a killer slashing their way through a bevy for generic and forgettable teens.

Dominion is a slow burn psychological horror film where for most of the movie’s run time the spreading evil is subtle and ambiguous. It is left to the audience to determine for themselves just how much of the cruelty and violence is a result of a demonic presence and how much is simply human nature.

Threats in the movie are more suggested than explicit with only occasional burst of shocking violence, including the slaughter of children at school. The acting is on point and credible and wisely, in my opinion, Skarsgard made no attempt to mimic Max Von Sydow’s distinctive voice and cadence but rather made his own interpretation of Merrin.

What Didn’t Work For Me:

Once the possession is fully revealed and though this is meant to be the same demonic force that nearly thirty years later will possess Reagan, that is no continuity in the possession, its manner, or effects. While there is a strong suggestion that the demon is using various characters’ guilt and shame against them, this is played for more subtly than when it taunted characters in the original film and having a strong continuity in the demon would have tied to two films together.

The digital effects are weak and often ejected me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. The threatening hyenas rarely were credible and instead of increasing tension the effect undercut the threat, lowering the emotional sense of the stake.

Overall while a flawed film and one that never fully recovered from its production woes Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is an attempt at a thoughtful introspective horror film that dares to ask is evil a force from without or something within all of us.

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is currently streaming on Peacock.