Cliff’s review published on Letterboxd:
By combining hicksploitation, religious hoaxes and general cynicism in a comparatively convincing mockumentary milieu, The Last Exorcism hits all the right buttons that a possession movie has to for a modern, liberal audience. It's hard to imagine a devoutly Christian audience either taking it as seriously, or finding offence in it, in the same way that they did The Exorcist back in the day, but who cares? It shrewdly makes a flawed hero out of a preacher who has turned his back on "real" exorcisms, yet is still happy to use artificial illusions to make money out of vulnerable people on the basis that it helps them psychologically. A documentary crew follows him to a farmstead to work his magic on one such family, and rather cleverly we never truly discover whether the daughter is genuinely hosting a demon or not. Dramatic music and a few lapses into the overdone "found footage" point-of-view occasionally spoil the effect, but there's a pretty amazing left-turn in the final minutes that permits an appropriately spectacular conclusion. Getting an actual contortionist to play the possibly-possessed girl was a stroke of genius.
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