The Seventh Day

Guy Pearce joins forces with a priest to cleanse the city of evil. After a long time, a properly unusual film on the subject of exorcism that takes a slightly different route, which is welcome. Unfortunately even on that level it feels so half-assed. I was happy with the first half hour, I liked that they were going from case to case, but once they hit the possessed boy, the film carried on with him until the end and honestly it wasn't very interesting. There are no interesting make-up effects to speak of, they rely on voice changes, and that's not good enough for me. There’s also hardly any gore and, apart from one atmospheric scene in a police station, there's not really anything memorable. Pearce does a good job, it’s not badly shot, and there is one interesting twist, so the film is stronger on the story side than the horror side, which will please drama fans but not me. A watchable film and fans of exorcisms might be relatively comforted, but I was expecting something more intense. 6/10. (03/21/2021)

Exorcism films are among my least favourite horror subgenres, they hardly ever bring a fresh approach or something original, most of them follow a precise template. In this sense, I appreciate that The Seventh Day is one of the few cases in recent years where the creators kept an ace up their sleeves – at least in terms of the story. Conceptually, I think it’s very well put together, which makes me even more sorry for the utterly dull execution; it deserved to be more impressive, the potential was there. They could have gone further with the scary scenes or the gore, or made it more formally distinctive, or if they’d at least refrained from dropping that interesting twist half-assedly about 40 minutes before the end, making the story lose its effect and end up, well… the way it did. It’s also a shame that the protagonist, the young father Daniel, doesn’t have even a hint of charisma. (03/20/2021)