The Cleansing Hour, a clever, silly 2019 take on the sub-genre that makes it work by borrowing a trick familiar from the paranormal investigator movie handbook (what if a bunch of fakers suddenly run into the real thing?).
Father Max is a failed priest that found a new calling performing exorcisms, which are streamed live to legions of fans over the world as a show called, of course, The Cleansing Hour. A hoax perpetrated by him, his childhood friend Drew (Kyle Gallner) and a small team who script the show, scout new potential subjects, and do the special effects.
Of course in reality Max is a self-serving douchebag who uses what little fame he has to sell merchandise and bed groupies, while Drew slaves behind the scenes to keep things together.
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Their shenanigans have not gone unnoticed. One night the actress who's going to play the possessed victim doesn't make it to the show (she's late, as in dead, due to a demon-related mishap), so Drew convinces his beloved fiancée Lane (Alix Angelis) to be bound to a chair and play the part of a host to a demon for Max to exorcize.
Only this time, a real spirit moves in to possess her, and makes his power immediately known by burning one of the team alive. How's that for entertainment? It then hands out a set of rules: Max must exorcise it by the end of the show, or Lane dies. Anyone try to leave the set dies. If the feed is cut, Lane dies.
And then it proceeds to torture Max, both physically and psychologically, for the rest of the running time, while Drew tries to identify the demon so they can find the ritual to perform their first real exorcism.
It gets... pretty silly. This is a movie where the view count or the network speed counts as a sort of McGyver's clock, with such riveting scenes as someone tracing cables to prevent his girlfriend from dying (this movie, you'll be shocked to hear, has no interest in showing any sort of realism its depiction of IT-related concerns), or a suspenseful shot of the view-count plummeting when things slow down. There's also a lot of heightened drama as the demon gets Drew and Max to confess their sins publicly - a whole lot of grimacing, shouting, and angst as their dirty little secrets and grievances come out.
But it works because the actors are wholly committed to their parts (especially Angelis, who has to play the dual role of Lane/the demon, and switch between them at the drop of a hat) and the script, which has a good ear for fun dialog and a wicked sense of humor that's played as straight as possible. Thankfully the film knows to play Max's mortification as a fun time and not as some redemption bullshit (even as people who are only complicit in his schemes suffer much worse fates, but hey.) There are some attempts to show a backstory for Max and Drew, which end up being predictably ridiculous, and develop their relationship a little; but the movie is definitely at its best when it's turning the screws on its characters.
There's also some interest in figuring out just what it is that the demon wants; some late developments introduce some very welcome twists, including a couple of truly excellent monster effects. The action often spreads out to show people watching the stream, which helps keep locations a bit more varied and inject some humor, and as with this year's deadstream, it has a lot of fun with the chat messages from viewers and the cynical merch-pushing (All merchandise is officially approved by the Vatican!).
It's a fun movie that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and plays it up with verve and conviction. Director Damian LeVeck and writer Aaron Horowitz expanded their 2016 short to make this feature-length, and while the bloat shows a little, it's still a great little slab of black humor and bloodshed.
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