‘Consecration’ Review – Cryptic Religious Odyssey Loses Itself Along Its Horrific Journey

Consecration is Christopher Smith’s religious horror film starring Jena Malone as Grace, an atheist woman who learns her brother allegedly killed a priest and committed suicide at the Scottish convent in which he served. While his death is being investigated, Grace stays near the convent, more or less within the watchful eye of Mount Saviour Convent’s Mother Superior (Janet Suzman) and a police investigator, DCI Harris (Thoren Ferguson).

The film begins in a cryptic manner: Grace walks down a street somewhere while she narrates over seemingly disconnected shots of other passersby, the rear window of a car with a toy angel figured prominently in the middle bobbles with the vehicle’s motions. Grace looks over, someone coming into her view as she continues walking, and we see a nun in the reverse shot, holding a gun up to Grace. If anything, Consecration knows how to get your attention at the start. But upon uncovering the details of its mystery, the movie grows tedious as it wears on.

There’s a lot of surprises in Consecration, and is frankly unique in that few people could predict where this story will take you even based on choice details that we learn about Grace and her brother later on. Despite being more of a side plot (and character), the film takes on a feeling of the murder mystery genre, almost assuming the identity of the story from the start. Director Christopher Smith has shown to be rather adept at subverting our anticipations with the trajectory of his films, like Severance and Triangle, films that defy a simple explanation without spoiling all the details that make those films an experience that surprise and delight at various points throughout. But despite all the things going for Consecration, including an engaging performance from Jena Malone overlooking her roving dialect, it fails to compel.

Digging into the why of what doesn’t work so well for Consecration requires unearthing some of its sacred details, but in exercising discretion the experience could arguably remain the same as if nothing were known about it. Grace encounters visions throughout the film and we’re shown things too, from snippets of Grace’s startlingly troubled childhood (whether completely real, imagined or exaggerated is anyone’s guess) to unknown ceremonies from the convent’s past. Grace’s visions in particular arise as moments that are visually striking, like nuns diving off from cliffs at the edge of a church building’s boundaries.

There’s enough going on here for Grace to realistically confront a crisis, even just in learning of her brother’s death, but she never faces such a conflict. Beyond the initial shock she remains unfazed and unbridled by emotions beyond that moment. She investigates the sources and reasons behind her visions at the convent, but what drives her to pursue this in a time others would normally set aside to grieve? Grace immediately rejects the conditions of her brother’s death yet we don’t see her as determined to discover what may have been covered up nearly as explicitly as she investigates her own fate. Her stoicism surrounding the tragedy of her brother’s death removes the human element from the voice of the film, and the surrounding characters aren’t fleshed out enough to provide a supportive peek into how complex the story is setting up to be.

In fact, that supposed complexity collapses into a disappointing pattern of all questions answered and the mystery vanquished with nothing really left to the imagination by film’s end. The inspector exists only to investigate and voice concern over how other characters behave, the Mother Superior is painted as a figure who looks and behaves far too moustache-twirly to be misleading in any capacity, and a visiting priest from the Vatican (Danny Houston) only ever delivers exposition before turning cartoonish towards the final act. By the time Grace discovers the fate she becomes so consumed by, what mystique and allure existed before has irreversibly drained from the film. It comes across as little more than thoughtless when the movie’s characters don’t have anything to contribute to their ultimately human predicaments even in the face of divine intervention. Not even angelic or demonic powers can reinvigorate that.

Consecration is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRjG65M6L2c]