Studio: Amazon Studios
Director: Damon Thomas
Writer: Jenna Lamia
Producer: Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, David Borgenicht, Christopher Landon, Jennifer Semler
Stars: Elsie Fisher, Amiah Miller, Rachel Ogechi Kanu, Cathy Ang, Clayton Royal Johnson, Nathan Anderson, Cynthia Evans, Christopher Lowell
Review Score:
Summary:
High school gets even more complicated for a teenage girl whose best friend becomes possessed by a demonic entity.
Review:
Nothing good ever happens when teenagers play with a Ouija board in a horror movie, even in one wearing a humorous halo like “My Best Friend’s Exorcism.” Couple an impromptu spirit summoning session with dropping LSD and you’re guaranteed to have a gruesome ghoul hitching a ride on your acid trip.
That’s what happens to inseparable best friends Abby and Gretchen when they join Catholic school classmates Margaret and Glee for a sleepover. We’re told from the ”Take on Me” needle drop and bedroom wall plastered with Culture Club posters that this is the 1980s, which means the Satanic Panic has hit its peak. Margaret’s lake house happens to be situated near an old building where a local girl was supposedly sacrificed, and Abby and Gretchen can’t resist the forbidden fruit of spelunking around a haunted location. The duo gets more than hallucinogenic freak-outs though, as Gretchen gets attacked by a paranormal presence.
Based on author Grady Hendrix’s same-named novel, “My Best Friend’s Exorcism’s” greatest creative strength comes from using demonic possession to make “Mean Girls” metaphors out of the social horrors of high school. If not for the evil entity inside of her, Gretchen’s sudden switch from spunky 16-year-old into a scheming sophomore might be waved off as an ordinary evolution often seen when teens undergoing personality transformations outgrow former friends or end up seduced by the sadism of inflicting emotional pain on peers. Gretchen steals more than a few pages out of Regan MacNeil’s playbook when she projectile vomits on Margaret’s jock boyfriend and spontaneously urinates all over a classroom floor. She takes even more cues from Lindsay Lohan, making manipulative moves that exploit her clique’s issues with eating disorders, sexual identity, and embarrassing secrets using very public displays of devastating humiliation.
Hoping to help her friend, Abby encounters roadblocks in the form of authoritative adults, another standard stereotype when suburban melodrama comes into play. Distracted parents just don’t understand what their daughters are going through. School administrators are equally useless, even turning the tables to level threats against Abby when she tries responsibly reporting her concerns about Gretchen. Misinterpreting Gretchen’s possession as a possible byproduct of sexual assault, Abby also alienates her friends by making a reckless rape allegation in one of the movie’s more misguided moments. That’s the thing with “My Best Friend’s Exorcism.” The sincerity of its sentimentality means well, but a breezy 90-minute lark streaming on Amazon doesn’t provide a properly tuned piano for hitting all of the intended notes of horror, humor, and heart.
“My Best Friend’s Exorcism” offers a textbook example of a film that’s functionally “fine,” nothing more, nothing less. Elsie Fisher and Amiah Miller play Abby and Gretchen as generally likable enough. It’s just that their introductions feel like a Cliff’s Notes version of a first act that never truly establishes an unbreakable bond that should anchor everything important about their story. Ironically illustrated by an opening scene where the two of them gossip over the phone instead of in person, we only get to know the girls in an impersonal manner rather than sharing meaningful experiences with them.
Supporting roles get bit by the curse of cardboard characterizations, too. It’s repeatedly obvious that the script stripped down its source material to a bare minimum of beats as people like Gretchen’s father and Christopher Lowell’s buffoonish motivational speaker are either defined by one oddball detail or else hit dead ends on abandoned side stories.
Although categorized as a light comedy, “My Best Friend’s Exorcism” is far from a laugh riot. Dialogue features no memorable one-liners or standout jokes. As has already been said, that’s the thing about the movie. Neither a mold-breaker nor a risk-taker, “My Best Friend’s Exorcism” finds contentment in doing it by the book, no pun intended since it’s an adaptation, and comfortably riding a middle road into mediocrity. It’s not insultingly average. It’s not annoyingly underwhelming, either. It’s merely a movie that more or less just “is.”
Review Score: 55
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