Consecration: But Now I See

It just occurred to me as I started to write this how many movies I’ve seen that take place in monasteries or convents. Something about the somber surroundings, the isolation, the presumed holiness or sanctity…it’s fertile ground for creepiness to be sure, but also has the problem of any well-worn location - the more a location lends itself to a particular type of story, the easier it is to just tell that particular type of story, and the easier it is to tell that type of story, the less likely it is any other type of story will ever get told. It’s why we have so many movies telling the same stories about old Nazi bunkers from World War II, or the same stories about abandoned mental hospitals. So yeah, stories in monasteries and convents will probably feature an unusually secretive or zealous religious order who are hiding some terrible secret, and someone coming in from the outside to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. I’ve seen that done well, and I’ve seen it done really badly.

Consecration - a brooding, careful, deliberate story that’s equal parts mystery and supernatural horror - doesn’t really break the mold much but it largely does what it does well, save a narrative choice toward the end that brings all of the momentum to a screeching halt for the sake of overexplaining something that you’ve pretty much already figured out.

We meet Grace Farlo as she’s walking down the street, with a voiceover monologue telling us that her brother always believed she had a guardian angel, while she believed in nothing. But now, she says as a white-habited nun approaches her, she’s not so sure. Flash back to some indeterminate amount of time before, and Grace is receiving the news that her brother Michael - who became a priest - has been found dead at convent in a remote corner of Scotland. Initial findings suggest that he murdered another visiting priest before taking his own life. Needless to say, Grace has a difficult time believing any of it went down like that, and travels to the convent in question to find out what actually happened. The convent is home to an especially - some would say fanatically - devout order of nuns, an order dedicated to the protection of a very important holy relic. As Grace approaches the convent, the Mother Superior recites their litany: “There is only one God…

…and his shadow.”

So on one level it’s your basic “person investigates unwholesome goings-on at a convent that hides a mysterious secret” story, as is almost inevitable with the location. And Grace is very much a woman of reason and science among the especially devout, so you have that element of attempting to explain the inexplicable through reason versus faith. The bones of the story are nothing new in that respect, but for the most part, it’s the execution that saves it. Sight is a consistent through-line - Grace is an ophthalmologist, one of the nuns has gouged out her eye because believes she saw the devil, and visions of the past and future play an important narrative role. And it’s a movie, so what we see is important to how we experience and understand the story. It’s assembled with care, and it keeps us guessing for about the first half of the film with a mixture of flashbacks, hallucinatory visions, and what might (or might not) be nightmare sequences, in a process that gradually reveals more and more about what actually happened here and why. It makes good use of disparate images and moments that hint at connections without making them obvious right off the bat, all set in an atmosphere of gloom, overcast rural Scotland, old convents and older ruins, all drab and gray with the white-habited nuns standing out almost like ghosts. The expected story beats are punctuated by a number of arresting visuals and striking moments throughout, and the cumulative effect is one that keeps us guessing as the film gradually builds to a revelation.

Which, unfortunately, is probably connected to the film’s biggest weakness. It’s not a bad revelation, and it’s all set up well by the creepily devout nuns, the pleasant, affable representative from the Vatican who, along with the sisters, has another agenda (because of course), and there are visual touches here and there, and small asides that broadly hint at nefarious goings-on without ever really giving things away ahead of time. Now, attentive viewers will probably figure out the twist sooner than it’s revealed, and that’s down to familiarity with the genre and the setting as much as anything. It’s a solid execution of a formula, but…it’s still a formula. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. The problem is what ends up serving as sort of a false ending on the heels of the big revelation. Once the truth has been revealed, the film stops its momentum dead to show us exactly how everything happened start to finish, and we don’t need all of it to get the point across. The problem is not revisiting key scenes with new information or context, that’s a perfectly respectable narrative device, and a big part of playing fair in any film with a twist (still looking at you, High Tension). The problem is that it pretty much revisits all of them, well after we get the point. It’s just gilding and regilding and regilding the lily and it brings everything to a halt in doing so. Any surprise evoked by the big reveal just evaporates, right when you want to bring the whole thing to a crescendo. Maybe a brisker montage would have worked, maybe intercutting all of it with the revelation itself, but as it stands it just kills the mood dead and does the actual end - a nice bit of circularity that pays off an early startling moment - a disservice by making it feel like an afterthought, something appended as an “oh yeah” after somebody finishes telling you what it was you just watched.

I don’t know that it would have been a transcendent bit of film, it’s still pretty beholden to narrative convention, the performances are good and it’s very well-shot, but it could have still packed a punch. In a film with the amount of subtext this one had about sight and belief, I guess I just wish they hadn’t been so literal about showing us everything.

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