Review: MY BEST FRIEND'S EXORCISM

Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since early childhood. They fit in fine at school, lunching with the alpha chick while maintaining their own bubble. So they're fine when the latter, Margaret, invites them out for a girls weekend at her family's lake house. Margaret's bf turns up with a page of lysergic acid stamps and they go tripping. Gretchen and Abby go investigating the ruined building they've just been told has a gruesome past and they reach it just as the acid kicks in and something weird and violent (and unclear) happens. After that, Gretchen is a social wreck, withdrawn and self-harming, claiming that an entity is trying to take control of her. At one point she freshens up and becomes the most sinister mean girl at school, humiliating friends and taking potentially lethal action against one of them. Abby, increasingly defeated by these things, keeps her resolve and fights to find the solution. It's going to get dark.

In this paragraph I'm going to try and suppress the fact that the source novel by Grady Hendrix is the most enjoyable book I've read in the last ten years. Just as a movie, MBFE struggles against its own awkward shifts in tone between satire, teen comedy and horror. And it loses the struggle. It's not the cast's fault as everyone on screen is doing fine work. It's stolid direction of a screenplay that doesn't know how bland it is. By the time you get to the heartfelt ending you wonder if you've got to know these friends in this story of tough friendship well enough to care.

The novel spans many decades, even though in concentrates on about two years. We meet Abby and Gretchen in childhood where a cultural touchstone endears them to each other and they become friends for life. Their shared culture and its history are essential to understanding their bond, down to their hilariously misheard song lyrics and views of the life around them. At the climax, when Abby calls on these resources in an epic tirade, all of this reaches its thrilling apex in a show both laugh out loud funny and solidly poignant. This book is of the kind that I'm thinking of giving it a regular re-reading, something I haven't done since I was at school.

While it is inevitable that a film adaptation of a good sized novel will need to cast off a lot of material so it can get to work on the main current of the narrative anyone, whether familiar with the book or not, is going to feel the lack of back story to the central relationship. Criticising movies for what they aren't is a futile exercise but, even I who can fill this in as the film starts, felt the assumption that the girls had a reason to be best friends was beyond question. See also, the missing bombardment of cultural touchpoints that the friends in the novel use to constantly pepper their communication. Every chapter of the book is the title of an oldie from the time of the setting (the '80s). When Abby comes to the scene where she must call upon this it feels like the adaptation threw up its hands and relied on another assumption that someone so young would naturally resort to this rather than it rising from a lifetime of shared experience. 

There is, in fact, almost no sense of lived experience in this version. There is almost none of the humour of the source. When the story must stand and take its position as a horror tale it cannot muster the energy to step across the line. Now I'm going to do something else i seldom need to do in a review: make comparisons. There are two films I can think of that touch the tension common to both comedy and horror and never ease the touch so that funny moments are memorably so and thriller or horror scenes play in their mode with no sense of contradiction: Heathers and Ginger Snaps which we remember as comedies until we watch them again. My Best Friend's Exorcism doesn't establish and then use its tension, it just applies tropes and, in doing so, fails its viewers and its own cast. The weirdest moment of this film is reading Grady Hendrix's name in the credits as a producer.