Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Crocket Brown, William Sadler, Katie Aselton, Cary Elwes, Diogo Morgado, Bates Wilder, Marina Mazepa, Christine Adams, Dustin Tucker, Gisela Chipe.
Faith is an acquired taste, too much of it can either be a blessing in the eyes of the devout, not enough, and the accusations and whispers start to float through the air as if caught on the winds of scandal; whispers that can be misinterpreted, rumours that can lead to exile, gossip that can unleash Hell on Earth and guide the faithful to take a life.
Faith is ever consuming, and it is to modern day understanding that perhaps we seek a more controlled belief of the wider implications at stake when we proclaim and subscribe to the subject of miracles; and yet there will always be the religious zealot, the ones who will cling to any hope that manifests itself as a benign and loving representation of their particular version of a God, of a deity, of the one they might call Father.
James Herbert, sadly lost to the world of literature and British Horror writing now for almost a decade, sadly does not receive the same care and attention for his work as others from across the wide, often deep, ocean, and that shows in some of the adaptions that have been made, and with the exception of The Secret Of Crickley Hall, it could be persuasively argued that none of them have lived up to the imagery and power of James Herbert’s writing.
To capture the ideal takes strength, purpose, insistence, and belief, and conceivably it could be said that in the direction and adaption of The Shrine, retitled as The Unholy, Evan Spiliotopoulos brings together all the right cinematic ingredients to the film to show just how it is feasible to pay homage to James Herbert’s imagination without compromising the overall effect and fear that one may have felt when immersed in the written narrative.
Faith and the church are not easy bedfellows of horror, some might even suggest they are odds with each other, for in chasing the truth of doctrine, of placing on film the ease in which some people look to false gods in times of turmoil, cinema opens a crevice in which many will see as a determination to expose the sentiment surrounding religion and its hypocrisy on certain beliefs and events.
The Unholy though does not seek to disarm belief but asks its audience to understand where it may lay, where it stems from, that what we might conceive as just and right, is like political lies, coming from a place of damnation, of deceitfulness, of falsehoods and evil.
In this, and with a terrific performance by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the embittered and disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn and William Sadler as Father Hagan, The Unholy leaves its mark as a positive and fruitful adaption of a James Herbert novel, and it is without doubt testament of the faith shown in Evan Spiliotopoulos that the film shines down on the faithful with grace.
Ian D. Hall