Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 5, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
I’m not a terribly religious person, but I’ve never been able to resist a good religious horror film. I’m a sucker for occult thrillers in which the characters declaim and debate about God, the devil and their eternal struggle, which has led me to cut movies like, say, Lost Souls a little more slack than most people. Which is why I held out some hope walking into The Order, despite Fox’s having shunted it from a January berth to the post-Labor Day death slot, with minimal advertising and no critics’ screenings (and this despite writer/director Brian Helgeland insisting that the studio just wanted what’s best for the film).
Sigh. Despite a decent smattering of the florid dialogue I always enjoy in movies of this type (“Your mentor was excommunicated for rejection of articles of faith!”), The Order is far from a cinematic religious experience. In recent weeks, some turmoil has surrounded Paul Schrader’s Exorcist: The Beginning, from which the director was reportedly fired for making the sequel too slow and psychological. Reshoots will apparently be underway soon, but it’s not hard to imagine that the troublesome first cut is rather similar to The Order, which has good ideas but fails to assemble them into dramatic or frightening form. It largely aims for a solemn, subtle, serious approach when a little more cutting loose might have made it more entertaining.
In fact, a few moments of bloodshed and CGI explosions aside, The Order is barely a horror film, but rather a spiritual drama centering on a priest named Alex (Heath Ledger), who travels to Rome to investigate the death of the above-mentioned mentor. Said elder has died under mysterious circumstances, and Alex discovers that an immortal being called a Sin Eater, once a human and now capable of absorbing and thus absolving a person’s transgressions, may well be involved. Together with colleague and friend Thomas (Mark Addy) and Mara (Shannyn Sossamon), a young woman with whom Alex shares a vaguely defined troubled past, he tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, and has his faiths and beliefs challenged as a result.
That’s the idea, anyway, but Helgeland adopts the tone and pacing of a sermon, and while it’s fine to give such spiritual material a respectful treatment, there’s little urgency to his plotting or characters. Not much really seems at stake for the protagonists for far too long, and aside from the appearance of a couple of demonic children in a cemetery (a scene that seems a result of a studio edict to get something scary into the opening reels), very little of supernatural consequence occurs in the first hour to grab genre audiences’ attention. The actors, for better or worse, are right on Helgeland’s wavelength, playing up a hoped-for depth that just isn’t there most of the time.
The one exception is Benno Fürmann, who plays the Sin Eater himself. After a brief appearance at the very beginning, he disappears from the movie till nearly the halfway mark, but energizes every scene he’s in. Like everyone else in the movie, he’s given to much talk about his place in the ecclesiastical world, but alone among the protagonists, he doesn’t appear weighed down by the “importance” of it all. In addition, a flashback to the Sin Eater’s origins (set during the building of the Duomo) is a rare example of Helgeland showing a character’s background, rather than telling.
As a result of the juice Fürmann gives his appearances, the second half of The Order is more compelling than the first, even though the finale hinges on a not-very-surprising revelation of a key player’s identity and hauls in a Papal conspiracy that’s too big a bite for the movie to chew. You’d expect a lot more people to be involved in such a plot than we get to see here; whether this is a result of Helgeland’s scaled-down, personal approach or budgetary constraints is known only to the filmmaker himself. Similarly, the climactic explosion of digital FX seems badly out of whack with the moodily lit skulking that has heretofore dominated the story. The Order isn’t a cardinal cinematic sin; it’s mostly guilty of sins of omission—most crucially, a sense of whether it wants to appeal to the theologians in the audience or genre fans in search of a scary and a little bit sacrilegious experience.
