Oli Jeffery’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Second possessed by demons and exorcised film of the evening...
Whenever a particular sub-genre of horror movie becomes suddenly popular, it’s not because it’s particularly good, or has a following despite being bad, or even because it’s a new way of scaring people. It’s simply this: it’s cheap.
Zombie movies just needed a bunch of game people to stumble around and a few semi decent actors to panic (good zombie movies of course need more than that, but that’s not the point). Slasher movies were even cheaper: only one villain and some hopefully attractive twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers.
On the turn of the century, The Blair Witch Project introduced us to the cheapest sub genre of all: found footage. You don’t even need a bad guy. You can just have three people running around in the woods.
Now, I’m being unfair; Blair Witch is a good movie, but my point is the attraction of found footage, and why it’s the most common type of straight to DVD horror these days is purely down to the cost to profit ratio. Only five people saw your movie? Doesn’t matter, it cost nothing. Which makes The Last Exorcism something of a pleasant surprise.
It’s disingenuous to even call this found footage: this is a mocumentary. It’s set up to be an actual film in the Louie Theroux style, it looks like it cost at least as much money as it would to make a real documentary (I know it would have actually cost more), and this allows it a great deal of room to breathe.
First of all, it jettisons the persistent question in found footage: “why are they filming this?” Because they’re professional film makers making a documentary. Perfectly valid. It also allows it to include welcome traditional film making techniques such as a score and proper editing without feeling like it’s cheating. The naturalistic script and for the most part great performances allow you, at least for the first forty minutes or so, to suspend your disbelief and think you’re watching a particularly weird Weird Weekend.
Then it all goes fucking nuts, which is all well and good - the ending is pleasingly mental, but it does wind up back at the place it’s been running from the whole time: found footage cliché - if (SPOILER ALERT) everyone dies, who delivered the film? Who edited it? Who released an actual documentary (if we’re buying into the conceit of the film) with that end? Surely, that would be illegal?
Perhaps I’m nitpicking (I’m also certainly nitpicking). There’s a lot to like here, as I think I’ve implied above. It’s genuinely scary. Ashley Bell as central character Nell nails both adorably sad and terrifyingly feral. The subtle (until the end, nothing is subtle at the end) effects add a production value not present in all the straight to DVD cheapies.
If it had just had the confidence to hold to its conceit throughout rather than just end with the traditional running and screaming, I would have loved it. As it is, I liked it a lot - and given that most horror movies I’ve watched recently have left me feeling very little at all, I’m okay with that.
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