Deliver Us From Evil

Deliver Us From Evil tries to merge a gritty urban cop drama with a spiritually charged exorcism thriller and winds up feeling like the worst of two clichés. As police procedural, it’s tedious and generic. As horror, it’s all loud noises and chaotic editing. Instead of getting under your skin, the movie just gives you a headache. It’s a dismal experience.
As the ad campaign proudly touts, Deliver Us From Evil is inspired by “true” events that happened to NYPD veteran and supernatural enthusiast, Ralph Sarchie. He chronicled his encounters with the dark side in a 2001 book Beware the Night, and director Scott Derrickson has been interested in bringing those stories to the screen ever since. It took Derrickson some time to establish credibility as a horror filmmaker—he had a minor hit with 2005’s similarly themed The Exorcism of Emily Rose and made a lot of money on a small budget with the genuinely unsettling Sinister, starring Ethan Hawke—but with the support of uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Derrickson’s dedication finally got the film made, though it hardly seems worth the trouble.
Eric Bana stars as a dramatized version of Sarchie, with the film taking place in contemporary New York City and combining several of Sarchie’s unrelated tales into a single plotline revolving around an Iraq War vet (Sean Harris) possessed by a demon. A lapsed Catholic, Sarchie’s no-nonsense approach to police work comes into conflict with the atrocities he endures on the job: domestic violence calls that turn into foot chases, finding a baby in a dumpster, a mother who throws her own child into a ravine at the local zoo. As Sarchie struggles to reconcile his life as a husband and father with the evil that men do, he encounters Father Joe Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez), who proposes that some violent behavior can be traced to origins far more malevolent than simple human frailty.