A long and convoluted episode of Call the (antichrist) Midwife.

Let’s be clear from the get go, the accidentally watched Omen/Augure (2023) was a far more interesting and visually spectacular film.  So I’m glad that there was a problem with that particular viewing.  Not that, in the end it was a problem.  The problem was with this viewing.

There’s this American, see, and she gets taken to an Italian nunnery with a view to becoming a proper nun.  She works in an orphanage and hangs with her loose, but also pre-nun housemate.  Now I always find it complicated when there are American’s in a foreign land and everyone is still speaking, mostly, English.  At least I guess, most of Italian’s had accents.  But it took a while to certify that is what was happening.  So for a bit I thought she was just Italian with an American accent.

There’s so much back and forth about who is devil’s spawn, who bears the mark of the beast, who should be in “the bad room.”  And I just didn’t care for it.  The premise, that the church is breeding the antichrist up to force people to return to the church out of fear.  Freaking weirdos.  And don’t get me wrong, I can really get into a spooky antichrist type story when it’s done well… religious horror is after all, a form of paranormal horror.  And I like the unexplained, and the potential of the unexplained.

But I think that’s it, this got so sidetracked by it’s tricky who is who plotlines that it forgot what makes a good horror.  There was too much to try and account for, to try and keep adding up.  Does this girl have the mark?  Does that one?  Do both of them?  Does that guy?  And by the time they sit down to try and figure it out in film I was well past caring.  And they’d been trying to explain how all the devil-breeding worked so many times it actually made less sense.

What horror do you get?  Some gory birth.  Some possible devil rape… or maybe hallucinations, it’s very unclear.  A creepy girl who draws creepy, future seeing pictures.  A gory car accident and an amazingly complicated suicide.  The suicide was pretty good/bad.  But the motivation for it was just… well… like a lot of things in this film it just made not sense to the story.

It was just like an annoying journey.  There was no delightful way to be engaged.  I didn’t care for the main character, and I also had a bit of trouble telling her apart from some of the other characters.  I’m not saying that nuns all look alike, but it probably didn’t help.  And that was another thing I pondered, maybe this film is better if you’re Catholic?

Anyway, there are a lot of things that bored me about this film.  

The greatest failing is that there are no black and tan dogs of any kind.

J* gives it 2 stars.