An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since I have a weak spot for Patricia Arquette and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. It turned out to be a rather dark and grim paranormal thriller with some religious undertones. Well, to be honest, I didn’t care much for the damned thing. Indeed, visually, it felt a like a MTV music video-clip which was definitely not a compliment but, even more problematic, the story was borderline idiotic. I mean, you had this priest going to some church in Brazil to investigate a religious statue weeping blood and, from this same church, a rosary went all the way from this little town in Brazil to Pittsburgh, USA, where a girl becomes, I don’t know, ‘possessed’ by this rosary. Of course, the very same priest then went all the way from the Vatican to Pittsburgh to check this. Seriously, all this didn’t make sense whatsoever and, if you have any knowledge about religious theology, you might wonder what being possessed might have to do with the stigmata.  At the end of the day, it was all about the dark apocalyptic vibe, they really loved this stuff at the turn of the millennium and this movie was actually fairly successful at the box office which would be rather unthinkable nowadays. The rhetoric was also a bit strange in the sense that it was Pro-faith but also Anti-Church at the same time. Concerning the cast, Gabriel Byrne was basically born to play such characters and he was actually not bad but it won’t be remembered as one of his most memorable performances. Concerning Patricia Arquette, she had a good run in the 90’s but she was almost 10 years older than her character and, even though she was lovely, she wasn’t really convincing here. On the other hand,  not many actors could manage to do anything with such rather abysmal material. Anyway, to conclude, I thought it was pretty weak and I don’t think it is really worth a look. 

5/10