True Evil

It seems that if you watch one documentary, the Netflix Recommendation Overmind decides to ply you with other documentary options. So it was that I came to watch a film called Deliver Us From Evil. It's a documentary about pedophilia in the Catholic Church, and fortunately I knew that going in. It's material one has to be properly prepared to take in.

The film focuses primarily on one particular priest who got bounced from parish to parish in California during the 1970s and 1980s. And it was even more difficult to watch than I'd imagined. Interviews with victims and parents of victims are interspersed with nauseatingly frank and almost wholly unapologetic interviews with the priest himself. In the back of my mind, I was dimly wondering where all this footage had been obtained, how it was this man was apparently free on the streets; in the course of the film, you learn that he served an unsatisfactorily light sentence, then was deported back to his native Ireland where he lives free and clear today.

As I said, the film focuses primarily on this one man (though sadly, far from one case), but uses that as a launching pad to attack the Church. It delicately walks a line where it never attacks the religion, but the organization surrounding it -- the institutional oligarchy that the film makes a great case exists not to do any spiritual good in the world, but only to perpetuate itself.

Furthering its measured tone and approach, the film also follows a man in the Church working on behalf of the victims, trying to get an acknowledgment from the echelons of the organization, an apology, a pledge to do better, something for the victims. The movie does not to seek to tar the entire Catholic Church, everyone in it, and everyone who believes in the religion, with a single brush.

But as I said, it's just plain difficult to watch. There's no happy ending, no release for the feelings the movie evokes, no real course of action the viewer can take (even less if one isn't a practicing Catholic). Obviously, reality can't be wrapped up in a tidy bow, however much one might wish it in a situation like this. But purely as a piece of film, that leaves the viewer unresolved, unsatisfied, and hollowed out.

I suppose even if this weren't the case, it would be hard to "recommend" a film like this, on a subject like this. So I'll simply say that forced to put some review on it, I'd call it a B, and then leave it to you to decide whether you want to watch it.