The Old Ways -- A New (Old) Spin on the Exorcism Film
Name: The Old Ways
Directed By: Christopher Alender
Subgenre: Supernatural
Series: Spooktober 2021 entry #24; review #117
Review: The Old Ways is an exorcism movie. You know the type: someone, for some reason, gets possessed by an evil spirit and it takes a spiritual practitioner's expertise to drive out the baleful presence. The particular subgenre thrust itself onto the horror scene by everyone's favorite pea-soup-spewing little girl in The Exorcist, and tales of demons, devils, and other overly-clingy spirits have been popping up every few years lock clockwork. Every now and again, there are attempts to subvert expectations--The Taking of Deborah Logan and The Last Exorcism come to mind--but the vast majority of the films revolve around a pair of Catholic priests working their particular brand of magic spiritual business against evil spirits that are evil because, to paraphrase the sage Stefani Germanotta: they were born that way.
The Old Ways is an exorcism movie without the priests. As you might have guessed based on the title, the film follows a pair of practitioners of the old ways of Mexican spirituality: brujeria. We meet our protagonist, the native-born Cristina, as she's apparently kidnapped by the pair of witches and chained up inside of a cell that doubles as a ceremonial chamber. We don't know why she's chained up, but only that she has an evil spirit within her, and Luz and Javi are aim to pull the demon out of her in the ways they know how. Throughout the film, bits of Cristina's story are layered back into the narrative: we're given a bit more context on the demon and how it may have come to take hold of her; but, more importantly, we get to explore Cristina's relationship to her captors, her heritage, and her own morphing identity. The film is admittedly pretty slow. While there aren't many attempts at scares, and the few scenes we get range between mildly unsettling and bits of spontaneous body horror (though nothing particularly gruesome). However, the tale does build up to a fairly compelling final act when the spiritual powers start their final, climactic confrontation. It's fantastical and engaging, and there's a spooky creature to boot. The film takes a curious turn from there that finishes out Cristina's metamorphosis, though for good or ill we can't be certain. And it's that unexpected uncertainty that (frankly, I should have expected given the genre tropes) I found particularly enthralling. I enjoy movies that stick with me after the credits roll (low bar, I know), and the ending had me abuzz with wonder and cynicism alike, though to get into the details would end up spoiling the experience for you. To be honest, the film is probably deserves a notch lower of a score than what I'm giving it, but the take on the subgenre is just so fresh that I couldn't turn away even during the story's lulls. It's nice seeing an evil spirit that's not something I could find by opening up my dusty copy of the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, the Lemegeton, or the like; traditional Christian demonology is tiring at this point, and even the usual attempts at twists or subversions still feel a bit bland even if their premise is fairly unique. Exploring an entirely different mythos, one that I'm woefully ignorant of, was enough to bring me into the plot...and probably inflate the film's score. Hey, we've all got our biases.
Overall Score: 4 out of 5 Chads needing more anesthetics for their impromptu psychic surgeries. Did The Old Ways scare you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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