The year was 1999 and with the millennium approaching, Hollywood was finding itself morbidly being drawn into a minor spurt of satanic panic as the clock for the twentieth century steadily ticked down. However, while religious horror saw something of an upturn in quantity, levels of quality proved to be a little suspect and one of the most prominent blasphemers turned out to be Rupert Wainwright’s dreary horror conspiracy flick, Stigmata.
While I suspect that some bright spark figured that a dour, deep dive into religious theology is what teen audiences were looking for during a period where sparky slasher films ruled, it also doubled down on looking like the director wanted to have the entire movie edited and shot like the most tiresome, 90s music video you’ve ever seen. The result was something akin to The Exorcist if Regan had shopped at Hot Topic and the effect was nothing short of abject boredom.
Frankie Page is a seemingly normal, but fairly trendy hairdresser living in Pittsburgh who suddenly finds that her life contains more problems than blunt scissors and douchey boyfriends when she has a horrific fit while bathing that’s more akin to being attack by an unseen force. As she’s being treated in a after being found by her friend, Donna, the hospital staff quiz her on the deep wounds found through her wrists, but while they obviously believe they’re self inflicted, Frankie knows that something far weirder than self-harm is at work here. Soon, the attacks return and every time they do, her new wounds start to become suspiciously Christ-like, and after an attack on the subway give her Frankie her most severe stigmatas yet, something obviously has to be done.
Enter Father Andrew Kiernan, a former scientist turned Jesuit Priest who is recruited by the church to investigate supposed miracles, who is starting to tire of a life disproving things that give people faith and is growing wary of the practices of his superior, Cardinal David Houseman, who seems to be moving fairly suspiciously when it comes to unexplainable phenomenon. However, once Kiernan meets Frankie, he soon starts to feel like what she’s experiencing could actually be the real deal – especially when her stigmata-attacks start having the atheist hair stylist levitating, speaking in other voices and even scrawling text on her walls in Aramaic.
While Kiernan and Frankie struggle to try and discover the reason for her bloody predicament, both become aware that the ravaged girl is rapidly enduring the five wounds Christ received while he was on the cross and while no one has made it all the way to five, if Frankie makes it to that onimous number, it could very well kill her.
Worse yet, Houseman, obsessed with keeping the secrets of the church, is about to go full DaVinci Code, especially when he discovers that the words Frankie wrote in Aramaic may be from the gospel of Christ himself…
If the prospect of a movie concerning a conspiracy of biblical proportions that managed to pop up about four years before the Di Vinci Code was published tickles your fancy, rest assured that Dan Brown isn’t the only game in town when it comes to sloppily written religious thrillers. But while Brown had his characters dashing all over the world trying to unravel a mystery that somehow has clues all over the fucking place, at least the guy was trying to have fun, which is mote than can be said about Rupert Wainwright’s impressively dull Stigmata. Ostensibly a conspiracy thriller that’s trying to ride the coattails of the soiled nightie of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, the movie ultimately ends up being a fairly irritating potboiler that mamages to cram almost all of 90s worst filmmaking habits into a single movie.
For a start, the filmmakers seem to truly believe that instead of building legitimate dread and tension by using such things as tone and taunt direction, they’ll just beat the shit out of the editing studio by having the visuals, sound and vibe play like the worst, 90s MTV, gothic themes music video you’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through. Every single trope you’d expect to find is here with tubular bells on, Frankie inexplicably baths with a church’s worth of lit candles around her that surely would heat her bathroom to the surface of the sun; dishy priest Kiernan is having the expected crisis of faith rhat comes with the territory; Frankie sniffs plenty of flowers to show off how virtuous and full of life she is and I genuinely lost count at how many times the filmmakers show a single drop of water/blood splashing in slow motion.
But while the people behind the camera readily test our patience by burying what intrest may lay in the plot in a pile of empty visuals, the actors on the screen don’t manage to make matters better at all – in fact, it’s weird to see such recognizable actors actively making things worse. Despite the fact that her character is undergoing a huge spiritual and supernatural upheaval that sees her very flesh painfully ripped, slashed, sliced and pierced, Particia Arquette seems excruciatingly bored throughout. Matching her oddly lifeless line readings is Gabriel Byrne who looks like he can’t quite believe his agent booked two religion themed, pre-millenium, horror films in the same year. But while he’s visibly having a blast playing the devil in End Of Days, he’s having nowhere near as much fun playing on the righteous side of the priest’s collar he looks just about as fed up with proceedings as Arquette is and their dour conversations about the nature of faith prove to be just as useful as a hole in the hand.
Thankfully, actors like Jonathan Pryce and Rade Šerbedžila are on hand to force feed a semblance of gravitas into the film thanks to some deft exposition and noticably authoritarian goatee that’s plastered on Pryce’s disproving features. But even with these old pros around to supply some weight to matters, the plot that they’re trying to sell is just too clumsy and the characters too flat to actually give much of a shit about what happens.
By the time Stigmata limps into it’s final act, it’s not even trying to form its own identity and instead tumbles into delivering a climax that trades heavily in recycled ideas. While the expected exorcism is paraded out that ticks all of the Pazuzu related boxes, it also chooses to smear everything in cleansing, late 90s, CG fire much in the same way The Devil’s Advocate ended barely two years earlier. It’s a shame, because the notion that the church is trying to squash an announcement from Jesus himself that the very fundamentals of worship should change, it’s presented in a way that could put even the most ardent horror fan, conspiracy theorist and bible thumpers to sleep.
Crucifying a horror/thriller that focuses on the stigmata may seem like a cheap gag that writes itself, but there truly is nothing here that managed to hold my interest – and judging by the performances, there wasn’t much to hold Arquette and Byrne’s either. But while there’s the occasion promising concept floating amid the flashy editing and overwrought set design, bad storytelling, irritating characters and zero scares suggests that the filmmakers hardly nailed it…
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