I remembered when the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose came out in theaters initially about 4 years ago.  It was right up my alley because the dark trailers I had seen for it looked like something that would be thought provoking and different, as religiously toned movies, especially ones that are at all even loosely based on true stories, often are.  I thought it was along the lines of another religiously themed thriller/horror movie I had liked a lot with Patricia Arquette called “Stimata”, and it was sort of the same deal.

While I will say one of my complaints about the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose is that sometimes the writing came off as hokey or cliche, I think the acting was very solid, and included a great cast of actors and actresses, including Emily played by the same woman who plays Dexter’s sister on the series about a serial killer called Dexter on Showtime, and Laura Linney, as always was good as the attorney who is reluctantly assigned the case to defend the catholic priest who is being tried for “negligent homicide” in the death of Emily Rose, because of a series of exorcisms.

Tom Wilkinson does a great job as the priest being tried, Father Moore, and Campbell Scott, whom I hadn’t seen in anything in years, was great as the attorney on the plaintiff side, the people.  What was interesting about this movie was that it was based on a true story, however I came to find out it was VERY loosely based on real events that occurred in Germany back in the seventies, where a woman by the name of Annelise Michel.

The real story was interesting and compelling, but the movie spun it as a supernatural occurrence while it sounds like the real life story was really an unfortunatel  series of mishaps for a seriously mentally ill young woman who was most likely schizophrenic.  The movie definitely took a lot of liberties and while the directors say they wanted to present both sides of the story and let the audience make up their mind, they definitely went for the supernatural, mystical angle. 

It worked - it was compelling and well directed, but the writing and scenarios could have used some work.  A good example of one hokey part (spoiler alert), was when one of the main witnesses is run over right in front of the defense attorney.  Oh, and they must have added scenes later, because there are two scenes where Laura Linney is clearly wearing a really bad wig, so there were some cases of bad editing that took away from the credibility of this otherwise solid movie.