[FANTASIA 2021] MOVIE REVIEW: AGNES is about the search for identity amidst the trappings of a possession horror film


Director Mickey Reece helms this often confounding would-be horror that serves up a nunsploitation possession horror for its first half before turning into a quiet character study with shades of 2019’s Joker.

When Agnes first starts its running time, a viewer familiar with the tropes of possession horror largely feels like they know what to expect coming into the film. The film’s opening setpiece presents an evening dinner amongst sisters at a convent. As the Mother Superior speaks, one of the sisters, the film’s titular Agnes (Harley McFarland), starts to explode with profanity and epithets. Lest we think this might be some psychotic episode, we see floating cups and a dark resonance to her voice that gives it an otherworldly gravitas. But something interesting happens here and as the film’s title card freezes on screen, we focus not on Agnes, but a fellow sister, Mary (Molly C. Quinn). It seems like an odd thing to focus on an unrelated nun in this instance. But, throughout the first half of the film, we often see Mary in the background and we start to see she’s not just affected by what is happening to Agnes in terms of possession, but we see she is also paying keen attention to how her possession is being handled. Father Donaghue (Ben Hall), an older priest who is largely more worried about where his career in the Church is going to end up is tasked with the exorcism along with a younger priest named Benjamin (Jake Horowitz). the demon inside Agnes manages to vex and confound them with their inability to free her soul. But it’s their failure, and that of priest turned supernatural TV personality Father Black (Chris Browning channeling Walton Goggins’ role in HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones to a T) that really marks the biggest shift in the film.

Because halfway through the film, Mary becomes the film’s protagonist. She and Agnes shared a friendship and Mary’s conversation with a possessed Agnes and the spectacle of the Exorcism prompt her to leave the convent and the film just follows her story moving forward. She becomes a grocery bag checked, working for a lecherous Chris Sullivan (This Is Us) and struggling to make ends meet on her own. She’s asked back to the convent, but she refuses, and she begins to act out aspects of Agnes’ life, pre-Convent, including becoming close to Agnes’ comedian ex-boyfriend, Paul (Sean Gunn).

And here’s where the film really will grab or lose the viewer. Because Mary is portrayed as almost clueless to life outside of the convent. It plays like the insanity of Morfydd Clark’s Maud in A24’s Saint Maud by way of Arthur Fleck in 2019’s Joker. At times it’s hard to tell if Mary is really even dating Paul, or maybe imagining it. She laughs at his jokes hysterically hours later to the chagrin of her boss and customers. Plus, she’s casually offered hundreds if she’ll sleep with her boss. The whole trajectory of the second half of the film has an air of the unreal and it leads to a meeting with Horowitz’s Benjamin where the two talk about life and loss at a sandwich shop with the hanging threat that she may be possessed.

Reece’s pacing is an issue with the film, as it does seem like two entirely disconnected films even if the premise is really interesting. The possession aspect of the film doesn’t really land and even the gore doesn’t really help it land; there’s a detached and oddly comedic vibe to the proceedings which just didn’t work for this viewer. That being said, the production design and cinematography do hold your interest and Molly Quinn, Sean Gunn, and Hayley McFarland deliver excellent performances. It’s largely the plot that doesn;t work in delivering a satisfactory conclusion and the non-ending leaves the film as something of an unfinished character study. I was excited for Agnes but ultimately left wanting.

Agnes has a compelling premise but ultimately is a disjointed film, with two disparate stories that struggle to find a connection. But the idea of a character study set in such an intense scenario is an intriguing one and Molly Quinn’s performance does deliver on that end.