The Unholy is a new supernatural horror movie that came out in theaters on April 2, and it's about a Catholic girl who supposedly sees visions of the Virgin Mary. Through her, "Mary" brings a message of absolute faith and devotion, and she wins over a multitude of followers with some pretty incredible healings. However, as with all horror movies, the truth behind these apparitions is much darker than anyone imagines. The girl isn't really seeing the Virgin Mary. Instead, she's actually being visited by the spirit of a woman who pledged herself to Satan almost 200 years prior, and this evil ghost is planning to use the girl to steal people's souls.
As a Catholic myself, I'm a big fan of Catholic-themed horror, and I was intrigued by the premise of this movie. While we've seen plenty of films about hauntings and possessions, I can't think of a single one about apparitions of the Virgin Mary. It's a really unique angle, so I was interested to see how the film would handle the topic.
But unfortunately, The Unholy does a really bad job with it. It takes just about the most boring approach possible to this refreshing idea, the characters are almost all just bland stereotypes, and the scares are super generic. On top of all that, the story is also a very thinly veiled attack on the Catholic faith, so as a Catholic, I had an especially bad time with it.
To see what I mean, let's take each of those elements one by one, starting with the story. Going into the movie, I was expecting it to set up a mystery about whether or not the girl's apparitions were genuine. I thought it would start out with the girl experiencing her visions and gaining followers, and we wouldn't know right away if she was legit. Maybe it would give a few subtle hints here and there that something wasn't quite right, but it would let us stew in the mystery for a good while before letting us know the truth.
That could've made for a great story, but it's not at all what happens. Instead, the film completely kills the mystery before it even starts, sapping the narrative of any intrigue it might've had. From the very first scene, it tells us that there's nothing divine about these apparitions. "Mary" is really just an evil demon or ghost, and the movie reminds us of that multiple times before any of the characters realize it. So instead of getting a compelling narrative that keeps us guessing, we get a very by-the-numbers story that unfolds pretty much exactly how we expect it to.
Now, a lot of good horror movies have very pedestrian plots, but they make up for it with great scares and likeable characters, so this doesn't automatically mean The Unholy is a bad film. But unlike those other movies, this one doesn't have anything to balance out its boring plot. Take the characters, for instance. Like I said before, they're mainly just bland stereotypes, so you can easily pigeonhole them after about five seconds of screen time. For example, there's the conman journalist who ends up not being so bad after all, there's the unscrupulous bishop who's willing to hide the truth just so his people will believe, and there's the seer who simply accepts that her visions are divine without any question whatsoever. Those are all just variations of standard character types we've seen a million times before, and pretty much everybody else in the film is like that too.
Next, when we turn to the scares, they're just as bad as the characters. The Unholy suffers from the same problem that a lot of mainstream horror has these days: it has one decently creepy scene, but other than that, it's pretty much all jump scares. The movie doesn't do anything new or creative in this area, so in addition to being a bad movie in general, it's also a bad horror movie in particular.
And finally, we have the very thinly veiled attack on the Catholic faith. Once the characters realize that the girl is actually communicating with an evil spirit and not the Virgin Mary, they still call this spirit "Mary," so the film becomes all about the dangers of praying to Mary, believing in Mary, being devoted to Mary, and a bunch of other things that sound a bit too similar to genuine Catholic devotion to the mother of Jesus. It's like the movie goes out of its way to describe this demonic pseudo-spirituality in almost the exact same way that we Catholics describe our devotion to Mary, and after a while, the message becomes too obvious to miss. I'm not normally one to find anti-Catholic sentiment in movies or TV shows, but even I can't deny that its present in this film.
All that being said, I have to be fair and let you know that The Unholy isn't entirely terrible. There is one good thing about it: the acting. While the characters were bland, several of the performances (especially Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the deceitful journalist who ends up being the hero) were good enough that I at least enjoyed seeing the actors act.
But in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't nearly enough to save The Unholy. While it may not be the worst movie I've seen all year, I definitely don't recommend checking it out. The bland characters, uninteresting story, generic scares, and anti-Catholic theme outweigh the good things many times over, so if you're looking for some exciting new horror, you won't find it here.
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