Has so much going for it, but that ending...

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2018)

This movie is not bad. I get how the ending is a huge letdown, but it's unfair to rate this movie 1/10 because of that.
It has a lot going for it, and it is refreshing to see a horror flick come by for the first time in a long time. A long time filled with horror movie junk. So much junk had been made in this genre, that i've reach the point that i consider a 5.8 IMDB rating an actually pretty decent score for a horror. This movie deserves significantly more than 5.8/10. The 7.7 average score it's getting now, a little too much in my opinion.
Cinematographically, this movie is very good. I love how it plays with light and dark. I was impressed how it made some things barely visible in the half dark, but not in the lame way most horror movies do it: namely by just making it too dark to see. No, the scary stuff was clearly visible, but they made it so that you only realise an instant later what you're looking at. They even did it the other way around at some point, and i think most of us recognize the situation: you wake up in the middle of the night, and a person seems to be sitting on a chair in some kind of crooked posture. Turns out it's just a heap of your own clothes.
I also remember a scene with a candle in the dark, and how it slowly lights op the people around it. Or the little trick where they skip time ahead by switching from a night to a day view of the forest house, synced to the music. Might have been done before, but i loved it.
Or filming someone walking through a hall, from the ceiling viewpoint, thereby filming her upside down as if she was walking on the ceiling, then continuing to track her while she walks underneath the camera, thereby automatically filming her upright again for the remainder of the hallway. This definitely has been done before. Might almost be cliché. But it was done well and it was fitting.
Special effects, some good, some i'm less enthousiastic about. The gory props were very well done. Gruelingly realistic. The light effects that had to do with spiritual activity, i don't know. I think it would have been better if they'd just omitted those.
The casting and acting were also good. Toni Colette was born for this, and i mean this as a compliment. She can express horror like noone else. Gabriel Byrne is also always a safe choice for a scary flick, although ironically he is the most stable and normal character in the whole thing.
The daughter, great choice, just perfect how she looks kinda "weird" (again i don't mean this disrespectfully but factually it is part of why she was cast in this role obviously), and you can't wrap your head around what's her deal.
Ann Dowd, well right now everybody's watching her in "Handmaid's", and we know to instantly distrust her. Made me kind of ambivalent actually about if that was a good thing. Obviously she can play these roles very well, but on the other hand, the first shot she was in, i instantly recognized her although she was all the way in the left of the frame, and in that instant i guessed half of her story for the rest of the movie. So casting her might have been a little too obvious.
The son, argually one of the most important roles storywise, i have some problems with. Admittedly, playing an adolescent boy (which brings a world of sorrow in its own), who gets confronted with such extreme circumstances is no easy task. But this guy is a professional actor, and we reviewers here measure every actor's performance by the same objective standards (that last sentence has to be read with a little bit of a sarcastic undertone).
That scene where he started crying..? Dude, that's how a 6 year old cries. I get that people in these circumstances might actually cry like a 6 year old, but in the movies it's just weird. Also by the end, where the movie gets more focused on him , i got the idea that the actor was struggling more and more with how he should actually express what's in the script.
But hey, what wásn't wrong with that ending. Talk about ruining a skillfully built up experience in the last 15 minutes. That was absurd? I really believe something went wrong in the process of making this movie. Out of budget so they couldnt shoot the original ending? Script wasn't finished yet by the production deadline? Sure seems like something like that happened.
Thinking back, the break was actually a little earlier, before the endgame started. The hypothesis about how something went wrong productionwise can also be supported by what happens to the lead character there. We are meant to relate to her, feel for her, think from her perspective, for most of the movie. Then suddenly, right before the endgame starts, she's suddenly one of the "other characters". We can't understand or trust her anymore, and the viewpoint to which we can anchor our perspective is gone.
This is just weird, and i can't understand why professional movie makers don't know why you should always be able to see things from the perspective of some kind of protagonist. Or rather, how when you have that protagonist, you shouldn't suddenly and for no reason change the role of that character to which you have learned to relate.
Now about the actual final part.
I read in one of the other user reviews that the audience started laughing, so i feared it would be another terrible movie, but i was happy to find that an hour or so into the movie it wasn't bad at all. But at the end, yes, in my theater too quite a few people started laughing (and i live in the Netherlands, we are a lot less vocal in the movie theater than Americans are!).
Me, i was just groaning and facepalming. Oh no. Why..
I can't go into much detail without spoiling. But i can point out another rule they should have known exists, and therefore shouldn't have broken. Don't over explain what's going on! The Exorcist doesnt end with a long exposition about who Pazuzu is and why and how he went after Regan, does it? It's totally unnecessary and undermines the mistery and inconceivableness of the whole situation. I took the movie quite seriously for the most part, but at that point it just became totally lame.
All in all, this movie deserves a solidly positive score. It was beautifully made, i was genuinely scared, it had great acting, and the story started out quite well. I would even watch it again, despite that ending. A proper ending would have made this an 8/10 though.