I don’t know why we decided to watch The Rite last night. I heard it wasn’t very good, and yet we were looking for a low-energy spooky flick and it was just at the front of the Netflix recs. Sorry to say that the movie did not impress.

Here’s our plot: Main character Michael Kovak is a young mortician who is for some reason faced with either choosing a career as a mortician or becoming a priest. (For context, the year is 2011, not 1961.) Figuring that he can get a free education at seminary school and then choose to leave the church at graduation, he dons a collar and starts faking his way through priest school. But after turning in his decision to leave the church, he’s “persuaded” (please see: lowkey blackmailed with hefty student debt) by his father superior to take a trip to Rome for one final go at priesthood, namely studying exorcism. There, he meets his classes with skepticism—until he starts unofficially studying under the tutelage of Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins, ladies and gentlemen). Working under Father Lucas, he starts to see the effects of demonic possession firsthand. As situations begin to escalate, he is faced with the ultimate test: Whether to treat these cases as scientific crises or whether to believe they are legitimate demonic possessions.

You know when you’re in school and there’s that person that’s always trying way too hard to look smart, and you don’t like them and your friends don’t like them, and even your teacher seems to think their behavior is a bit much? It’s unfortunate that the main character of The Rite is exactly this kind of student. Michael is just so incredibly unlikable. And while they try to couch it by adding all these parameters around why he would even bother going to Rome, it’s hard to believe that a man this anti-church would survive four years in seminary at all.

Additionally, his faithlessness offers nothing groundbreaking. His arguments against the legitimacy of these demonic possessions are the kinds of arguments you hear from teenagers in 10th grade who read one Wikipedia article on atheism, not a guy who’s graduated from priest school. And since he’s been anti-church since day one, it becomes tough to take his “crisis of faith” seriously until about two-thirds through the movie.

By contrast, I would watch an entire movie on Anthony Hopkin’s character Father Lucas, who is the goddamn backbone of this entire film. Why he opted into this script is beyond me, but his seeming nonchalant earnestness really knocks Annoying Michael out of the park. Throughout the movie, he visits and tries to help those who think they’re being tormented, and has an inexplicable patience for his protege’s questions. But it’s clear that his talent exceeds his peers, and even his performance can’t really make the story cohesive.

Frankly, the biggest issue with this movie is that they tried to make Catholicism sexy. Our lead is a male model who hooks up with a woman in a microskirt (and an APRON, for some reason?? seriously, see 0:50 here) in the first ten minutes of the movie and then decides to go to seminary for four years. And when in Rome (ha), he befriends an equally sexy journalist who is trying to write a piece on possession. A lot of these problems are just pre-MeToo bullshit, but it ends up hurting the integrity of the plot. It becomes tough to reconcile the sexlessness of the Catholic Church with Annoying Michael’s capacity to be a chick magnet. It also makes it hard to take his “crisis of faith” seriously when he’s making goo-goo eyes at anything remotely female for the entire first half.

In my opinion, it would’ve been way more effective to cast the lead as a priest who actually had a little faith, so that the audience could get more invested in his faith crisis. (After all, it could swing the other way: maybe he could consider that possibility that a person he thought was possessed might actually be experiencing schizophrenia?) If not, they should’ve made him a journalist or at least a civilian. His disdain for the church would’ve been more understandable at least, and then they wouldn’t have had to half-ass a possible romantic interest either.

As it is, this movie comes off as a “tHe dEviL iS rEaL” Catholic crusade that makes zero sense and is barely scary.

One outa five, but only for Anthony Hopkins trying his best.