The church has itself a controversy, and quite possibly a genuine miracle on its hands. Nobody believes him until she starts talking to everybody - the doctor, her uncle, the priest (William Sadler) and then the masses.
At least “blood alcohol level” threats from the town doctor ( Katie Aselton) sober him up.īut that girl? Alice ( Cricket Brown) has been deaf and mute since birth. And almost running over a barefoot local teen, running down the road in her nightgown, doesn’t wise him up, either. When Finn smashes the doll, cooks up some supernatural reason for it, gets a photo and mutters “NOW we have a story,” we know he’s got more of a “story” than he bargained for. What Finn doesn’t know is that “Unholy” opens with a grisly 1845 priest-sanctioned execution, seen from the victim’s point of view. It’s wrapped in chains, with a nonsense date attached - “Feb. He’s “fifteen, actually.” And you can finish that joke yourself.īut Finn stumbles across something that might replace the story-that-wasn’t, a “kern doll” buried beneath a gnarled, long-dead tree next to the small town’s Catholic church. The best scenes in the film are Finn’s jokey, eye-rolling reaction to a farmer’s claims about his cattle. He haggles over pay, tops off his take-out coffee from his flask and heads out to cover a rural New England “cattle mutilation.”
Morgan plays Jerry Finn, once a star reporter for a major Boston newspaper, now scraping by on scraps from a website, a freelancer who lost his career in a scandal a decade before. It’s just that the picture loses itself and any momentum it has in “explaining” these wonders and healings as the work of a Mary who isn’t the “Virgin Mary” all involved assume it is. The effects are top notch and there are some chills in it. Biggest and best of all is the lead, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, cast as a cinematic cliche but delivering the goods as the latest take on the jaded, liquor-loving journalist trope, this time a disgraced reporter who specializes in the paranormal who stumbles across “real miracles.”īut the handsomely-mounted movie– writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos’ adaptation of a 1983 novel - rather lets Morgan down as his character drifts from cynicism to True Believer. Producer Sam Raimi helped lure some big names to “The Unholy,” a Catholic “Our Lady’s no ‘lady'” thriller timed to hit theaters for Easter.