The Horrors of 2023: Consecration

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Let’s make this a short one. Consecration should have been my happy place: violent nuns, folk horror, and possession. But it was only muddled and confusing. There are positives – elegant acting by leads Jena Malone, Janet Suzman and Danny Huston, and some lovely, awe inspiring scenery in Scotland. The plot weaves childhood abuse, an ancient pagan cult countered by an order of pseudo-Knights Templar, and an occult possession mystery around the suicide of Jena Malone’s priest brother. As Marya E. Gates of RogerEbert.com notes, the nods to nunsploitation weakly cue Ken Russell’s The Devils. Ultimately, there exists some sort of commentary about religion, but nothing of substance comes through.

Of all the 2023 horrors I’ve taken in to date, why did it have to be the nunsploitation one that left me unimpressed?

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The Horrors of 2023: Infinity Pool

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In 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, Brandon Cronenberg made me ill. Possessor, his excellent second directorial feature, bored its way into my brain as surely as the fictional device its corporate assassins used on their victims. Its protagonist un-mothered, shed her skin, and become something fully stripped of anything close to human.

Similar, if not parallel, trajectories awaited Alexander Skaarsgard’s character in Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool.

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