Fantasia Fest 2021: ‘Agnes’ swaps exorcism tropes for sharp poignancy around death and grief

With the recent announcement of three new The Exorcist films, it’s hard to imagine what the possession sub-genre has left to offer. The 1973 film, starring Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, and Jason Miller, is a transcendent piece of work, setting the course for nearly fifty years of back-breaking, head-twisting, and vomit-spewing delight. In his follow-up to the much-lauded, hyper-stylized vampiric tale Climate of the Hunter, writer/director Mickey Reece rearranges the demonic format’s mechanics into a refreshing, convention-busting narrative. Instead of presenting your usual exorcism story, he showcases the deterioration of the human condition through the ruins of grief and loneliness. Playing this year’s Fantasia Fest, Agnes, with a screenplay co-written with John Selvidge, injects refreshing style, nuance, and emotion into the genre in a way that is fulfilling yet totally devastating.

Reece is nothing if not daring in his conceits. Our darkly humorous yarn opens upon an isolated convent where a perverse entity has taken hold of Sister Agnes (Hayley McFarland). During an evening celebration of Sister Gertrude’s long-standing dedication to the faith, she begins spewing every manner of hilariously depraved invectives. “You are all whores of Christ!” Anges spits, writhing in her seat and throwing delicious cake at her sisters. Immediately restrained, Agnes is more of a propeller for the story, rather than the central figure; that baton lies solely with Sister Mary (Molly C. Quinn), who knew Agnes before the sisterhood and whose own horrific past drove her to seek counsel in the convent.

The Diocese soon calls upon Father Donaghue (Ben Hall) to perform a rite of exorcism. His previous history with handling possessions makes him the perfect man for the job, even though he doesn’t actually believe demons are real. Along with his dashing protégé Benjamin (Jake Horowitz), Father Donaghue makes a house call, quickly finding his faith pushed to the brink. Upon wheeling poor Sister Agnes, disheveled and distraught, into the chapel for the Lord’s sacrament, he comes this close to meeting his maker as Agnes seizes his lips in a ravishing, lustful kiss before chomping down on his nose, sending blood spurting around the room.

But he’s not the only one undergoing a grueling test; Sister Mary witnesses the slow unraveling of her friend. In one especially moving scene, Sister Mary perches on Agnes’ bedside for an intimate, revealing conversation. “Are you afraid of me?” asks Agnes. In fact, Mary isn’t scared of what her friend has become, rather she’s fearful of death and her own all-consuming grief. As we come to learn, she once had a son and has yet to fully process or even accept what happened. “You have to bury the dead, Mary,” Agnes advises.

And therein lies the thesis of Agnes. With the film’s second half, an about-face so severe it’s jarring at first, the film guides the viewer into Mary’s post-convent life. Such tonal whiplash will be hard to swallow for many viewers, standing in stark contrast to the first half’s darker and more brooding atmosphere. Yet Agnes is better for the switch-up, delving into the outward ripples of grief and how one young woman is practically swallowed whole by the past. Working as a grocery store clerk, Mary meanders through her life, listless and uninspired. She sought faith as a means to an end, a way out of her loneliness and misery, and what she found was nothing of great value. In the end, only she could lay her demons to rest and say farewell to her son, as well as Agnes, once and for all.

Agnes is beautifully poignant, arriving in a time when so many have experienced close brushes with death and were left to wrangle with their own inquiries about death and the afterlife. It lands somewhere between the absurdity of The Little Hours and the great sorrow of Saint Maud, situated as its own beast entirely with sharp teeth and even sharper messaging about life, loss, and coping with tragedy.

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