Mark Reviews Movies: CONSECRATION

Consecration, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 9, 2023

Co-writer/director Christopher Smith wants to keep us guessing with Consecration. The filmmaker probably should have considered a reason for us to care about this material first.

Smith and Laurie Cook's screenplay revolves around a few mysteries. The main one has to do with the death of a young priest at a convent on a hilly coast in Scotland. Others, though, include a different priest with seemingly sinister intentions, a series of flashbacks to some witchy ritual taking place in the Medieval period, a fundamentalist sect of Catholicism that was founded by Crusaders and used to—and still might—endorse a form of confessional suicide, and, not to be undone, the nature and context of the movie's opening scene. It features a nun approaching our protagonist and pointing a gun at her face. This is a striking image, to be sure, although it's the sort of grab-them-right-away introduction that's so over-the-top that it's funnier than it is shocking.

The same description could be aimed at a lot of the elements of this story. We meet Grace (Jena Malone)—a name that offers up one of the bigger accidental mysteries of the movie, in that Smith and Cook thought they could get away with such on-the-nose irony—chronologically before the unsettled business with the pistol-packing nun.

She's an ophthalmologist working in London and who is skeptical of religion. This is basically the extent of her character, beyond the constant uncertainty she grows to have about what's real and what's some kind of hallucination. Whenever there's a lull in the plot, the screenplay keeps having Grace assert—either causally (reminding a colleague she doesn't believe in miracles) or rather aggressively (yelling at a nun within minutes of meeting her)—that she has no patience for faith.

The dead priest, who apparently died by suicide after murdering a fellow man of the cloth at that Scottish convent, is Grace's younger brother Michael (Steffan Cennydd). The two siblings had already endured plenty of tragedy, with their father murdering their mother and now serving life in prison, and now, Grace is left without any family or any answers as to what could have led him to kill someone and then himself. The generically named and utilized Detective Chief Inspector Harris (Thoren Ferguson) has no answers for her, either, but he's determined to find some. Well, he is until the movie starts piling even more puzzles to be solved and more questions to be somewhat answered on top of this relatively simple premise.

Among the other mysteries are the natures, motives, and goals of Father Romero (Danny Huston), who has come from the Vatican to investigate the murder-suicide and seems genuine in his desire to help the grieving atheist, and the convent's strict Mother Superior (Janet Suzman), who's not much of an enigma since we've already seen her aiming a gun at Grace at some point in the future of this narrative. Indeed, the helpful priest reveals his true colors to the audience relatively early, meaning the only questions of value are what the zealots at the convent want with Grace and how long it's going to take her to figure out what we already know.

The bulk of this story, then, amounts to Grace suspecting something is amiss—because of course it is, even without us having those suspicions confirmed—and looking for clues. Meanwhile, she starts having more frequent flashbacks about her tragic past, visions of that even more distant past and a young witch, and hallucinations about the nuns coming to harm (There are so many knives in this convent).

Smith and a pair of cinematographers, Rob Hart and Shaun Mone, get some mileage out of the convent's cloudy surroundings, including the ruins of an old chapel where that suicide ritual took place, and its oppressively dim interiors. Whatever grim atmosphere the filmmakers establish, though, isn't nearly enough to distract us from how routine and vague the particulars of this plot are.

There is, finally, a point to both the mystery and the reason the screenplay seems to be offering up a theological debate of sorts without establishing the terms of its argument. The simple fact is that the ultimate answers to Consecration are so simple that to even hint at their nature would give away the entire game. Smith can't do that, of course, because the whole point of this story is its big revelation, which is just silly and subversive enough that it's a shame the filmmaker withholds the notion as a cheap twist.

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