Welcome to December, the time of year when I really ramp up my efforts to see as many 2018 films as I can before the end of the year. Unfortunately, unless the Cinema Fairy visits my local multiplex(es) and sprinkles enough magic dust to make them show Suspiria and/or The House That Jack Built, those films are out of the running, but not to worry! There's still plenty of films from this year that I should have seen before now! Which is why I'm starting with a random pick - the Irish found-footage film The Devil's Doorway.
In 1960, priests Thomas Riley and John Thornton are sent by the Vatican to a Magdalene Laundry in Northern Ireland, to investigate an apparent miracle there - a statue of the Virgin Mary has allegedly been weeping blood. The older Father Riley is cynical and disbelieving of the events he is sent to investigate, while the younger Father Thornton, who is filming their investigation on a 16mm camera, is much more eager and willing to believe in the supernatural. Father Riley is also concerned with the conditions at the asylum, where "fallen women" are sent to be used as unpaid labour by the nuns who run the facility as "penance" for their perceived sins. During their stay there Father Thornton starts to experience paranormal phenomena and comes to believe more and more, while Father Riley is more concerned with what is going on in the Laundry. Things come to a head when they discover a young girl, pregnant and chained to a bed in the basement of the asylum, in a room whose walls are lined with crucifixes. What is the real reason that the two priests have been called to the Magdalene Laundry, and what is the truth of the terrible things that are happening within its walls?
The Magdalene Laundries is one of Ireland's biggest scandals (although the Laundries weren't just in Ireland - there were also Magdalene Laundries in places like England, the United States and Australia, among other places.). They were institutions for "fallen women" - theoretically prostitutes, but in practice, any girl or young woman considered promiscuous or difficult, or the mentally disturbed, could be sent to one of these places. There they would be forced to work unbearably long hours, usually doing laundry by hand, and were usually mentally and physically abused by the nuns who ran the Laundries. Many were also sexually abused by visiting priests as well, and in recent years there has been proof of mass infanticide discovered at the sites of some former Laundries. They were terrible places and to its credit, The Devil's Doorway does a good job of showing this - even if it does place at least some of the blame on distinctly non-Catholic forces by the end of the film.
And about that... We've got an old priest and a young priest, and a young girl kept chained to a bed in a room with crucifixes lining the walls (who all inevitably become Petrine crosses at one point in the film, of course); she speaks languages she shouldn't know, self-mutilates with a crucifix, causes a nun to do some extreme yoga and levitates off the bed at one point. Hmm, all this reminds me of something but I just can't quite put my finger on it... The film also starts with one character (the young priest) running around some basement ruins with his camera and calling out for the other priest before being ambushed by someone (it's a flash-forward, of course), and I was listening carefully to see if I could hear any echoing cries of "Tell us where you are, Josh!" And this, I feel, is one of the main failing points of the film - it's way too obviously derivative.
I also feel that the film should have had more courage in its convictions. From almost minute one we're shown that the Laundry is a terrible place and that the women there are being terribly mistreated by the nuns, and that the Mother Superior in her little frilled bonnet is a really evil piece of work hiding behind the shield of religion. It would certainly have then made perfect and poetic sense for the holy statue to be weeping blood in a sort of outrage of how the women were being abused. But then we veer off into occult rituals, baby sacrifices and the nuns all being secret Satanists, and I've got to say, that disappointed me. It felt like a cop-out; we know just how bad these places were both from our own knowledge and what the film has shown us, but at the very last minute the blame is shifted somewhere else.
There was also one technical aspect that confused me. Several times during the course of the film, the camera being used to film everything would "blink" - ie. go black for a second, usually while something tense and supernatural was going on; often when they/we were following said supernatural event. Now I don't know if old 16mm cameras in 1960 did that, but it felt much less like an actual technical issue and more like a device to heighten tension - especially since it didn't happen all the time. As I said, it seemed to happen whenever they were chasing a ghostly child down a corridor or some stairs (oh yeah, there are sinister ghostly children in this as well, mainly for the purpose of jump scares), possibly to hide their movements so they could appear and disappear at will (and for the jump scares). Filming the whole film on 16mm was certainly a bold move though, and impressive in itself. It's just a shame they didn't feel they could be a little bolder and more original.