The story of St. Ignatius Loyola begins with him bedridden by fever, during which time a vision of an angel appears to him, telling him not to worry. What distinguished Loyola (and subsequently the Jesuit order he founded) was his response. He was not glad of the angel, but instead asked how he could know the angel was really an angel, and not a vision sent by the Devil to tempt him? Thus, the Jesuit order has as one of its primary precepts the “discernment of spirits,” a tendency to skepticism and intellectual rigor not always found in Christianity.
Final Prayer (a/k/a The Borderlands) is a reasonably smart, tense, found-footage (of a sort) film that doesn’t overplay its hand, and thought it never quite reaches the heights of terror it could, it comes pretty close. It’s also very much a movie about the gradients of belief, and how it does or does not intersect with religious faith.
We begin with what appears to be some kind of archival footage from Portugal, of law enforcement raiding a church, pulling bricks away from the wall behind the altar to reveal what’s hidden there. It appears to be audiovisual equipment - speakers ,wires, etc. It’s all frantic and chaotic, interrupted by someone taking a call - a bunch of people have disappeared, someone else is in intensive care. It’s over before we can really make sense of it. Cut to what seems to be an entirely different movie, and a man named Gray cataloging a bunch of audiovisual equipment and rigging a cottage up with cameras. Gray has been hired by the Vatican to provide technical support to two of its official representatives - Deacon and Mark - who are headed to a very small village in rural England to investigate a miracle reported by the village’s priest, Father Crellick.
As investigators of miracles for the Vatican, Deacon and Mark are in a profession that requires them to apply scientific rigor to matters of faith. There’s money in miracles - increases in church attendance, tourist business - and faked miracles undermine faith and the legitimacy of the church. So their job is investigating miracles, to try and debunk them to weed out the fake ones, then pass their reports up the chain. Gray is basically just the A/V guy, a gun for hire. Deacon arrives first, a dour Scotsman who greets the news that the cottage is wired for video and that he’ll have to wear a head cam all the time (official policy since “the incident in Belem”) with distaste. Mark is in charge, but he’s running late. Deacon greets the news that Mark is the lead on this investigation with even more distaste. There’s a history there. They’re all bunked up together in a small two-bedroom cottage for the duration. Mark gets the master bedroom, Deacon and Gray have to bunk together. Nobody’s happy about it.
The church is very small, and very, very old. Father Crellick seems nervous, but he has a videotape to show the investigators. It was shot during a christening, and as Father Crellick begins to baptize the child, the child begins to cry, then wail, then scream. And then there are strange creaking and shuddering noises. The cross falls from the altar. The footage goes staticky, as if something is emanating a powerful magnetic field, and Crellick greets something off-camera rapturously as “Our Father.”
It’s a very old church.
The film itself is as careful and measured as the protagonists, the majority of its run time occupied by a meticulous investigation of the church and its archival documents. Deacon and Mark are here to find a mundane explanation for an apparent miracle. And really, that’s how science works. There’s an adversarial edge to it. It’s not intended personally (usually - there’s always the potential for ego to get in the way), but rather as a way to ensure that the work is as strong as it can be, the evidence as strong as it can be, so that the claims are as defensible as possible. You pick as many holes in the research as you can to show the researchers where they need to strengthen their argument. And that’s what Deacon and Mark do - they meet claims of mystery with adversarial empiricism. If the Vatican is going to declare something a miracle, they’ll want to be as sure as possible that it isn’t otherwise. So there’s an interesting contrast between the natural and supernatural right at the front here, but it isn’t overplayed. For the protagonists, it’s not a crisis of faith as in a film like
The Exorcist, it’s just the job.
The three protagonists provide a study in contrasts as well - Deacon is equal parts a skeptic and man of faith. He sincerely believes in the mission, because he is a true believer in God, and he’s a skeptic because he reveres God and has seen plenty of bad fakes. Mark, it turns out, is a high-ranking church official, an officious little prick who has forgotten his faith, so caught up in the worldly affairs of the church (he was late because he was attending a fundraiser in Boston) that he vocally expresses his frustration that the church refuses to move past “medieval superstition.” He is skeptical to the exclusion of faith, more interested in bureaucratic procedure and fitting rules to the world than admitting the possibility of mysteries. Gray possesses neither faith nor skepticism - he’s not religious (he believes in “you know…stuff”), but he’s also the most gullible of the three, the one most likely to overlook mundane explanations once weird shit starts happening. Father Crellick completes the picture as a man entirely of faith without an ounce of skepticism. He’s seen a miracle, he’s sure of it. What else could it be?
The film works well as a slow burn - at first they’re just investigating a church, going through procedure, looking for the usual signs of fakery, then the strange noises start, then the strange events, Father Crellick starts off squirrelly and heads for downright erratic, and then the stuff they can’t explain starts happening. It kicks off late, in the third act, but once it does it picks up momentum quickly. It doesn’t quite reach the gonzo heights I was expecting or hoping for, but it also never overreaches in what it shows and doesn’t show, and so the result is solidly unsettling.
On the other hand, the found-footage conceit feels like a bit of an odd fit here. It isn’t handled badky at all, there’s narrative plausibility (even since the incident in Belem, everything and everyone gets recorded at all times, like the spiritual equivalent of body cams) and the filmmakers don’t overplay it with a goofy title card, but the conceit breaks in a couple of places. It’s not presented as recovered footage per se, and so avoids some of the bigger ways that conceit tends to strain credulity, but they commit to the perspective strongly enough that it’s a little jarring on the couple of occasions when they don’t. The acting is solid - everyone mostly seems like real people, if not especially well fleshed-out. There’s a bit of backstory related to the opening that gets developed throughout and shines some light on Deacon, but that’s about it. Gray and Mark are both kind of abrasive at first, but once they get down to the brass tacks of the investigation, everyone demonstrates a quiet competence that leavens the more obnoxious moments. Mark does start to verge on caricature by the end, but by that point the tension is high enough that the film’s momentum sort of carries you past it. The cinematography isn’t especially flashy, since we’re mostly looking at captured footage from headcams and static cameras installed in their lodgings and the church, but it employs camera noise and interference along with spare, careful sound design to good effect.
The film too, on a structural level, explores the tension between the supernatural and the natural. As the film goes on, mysterious things start to happen - strange noises in the middle of the night, the crying and wailing of a child in the church when it’s supposed to be empty, an especially unpleasant omen involving a burning lamb - creating a sense of foreboding and unease. It’s easy to believe that there’s something supernatural going on (it is, after all, a horror film), only for each weird little incident to be explained as something mundane. There are all sorts of little moments that you expect to turn into scary moments, but don’t - part of this feels like it’s feeding tension and denying release, but it’s also sort of saying that sometimes your expectations are wrong. Sometimes it really IS just a small, quiet cottage in the middle of the night.
It’s like the film itself is doing the protagonists’ job. There’s a plausible explanation for everything that happens to them…up to a point. And it is at that point the cracks begin to show, in the third act, when the rational explanations run out and each person’s approach to belief leads them into the dark and the horrible, utterly inexplicable thing that waits there. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” They wanted to know if the events Father Crellick witnessed were the doing of something beyond our understanding, and they found out. They discerned the spirits, and it cost lives.
Damn, this is really good! Just saying cause writers don’t always hear that — but it’s true. Stumbled on this and was glad I did.
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