I Watch Films: The Order

 

The Order

There’s a hot young American priest in America, and an old Italian priest in Rome and also a fat Irish priest in France. They’re the last of an order called the Carolingians who specialise in exorcisms and fighting demons. The old Italian priest dies and a Cardinal, tipped to be the next Pope, asks the hot young priest to investigate.

He goes there, bringing along a hot artist he once exorcised; she’s escaped from the mental hospital she was committed to after she tried to kill him during the exorcism. He also gets the fat priest to come and help; they find odd marks on the body and in the old priest’s library details on a sin eater. Going into the weird literal underworld of Rome they’re given clues by a masked “Black Pope” who offers prophecies from hanged men.

Eventually they track down the sin eater, William Eden, who has been alive for centuries, taking over from the previous sin eater who took the sins from his brother who died during the building of St Peters. The church had refused him last rites due to being excommunicated for giving a dying Arab holy water to drink as there was no other water. As a sin eater allows absolution outside the church it’s a heresy and bad.

It all gets a bit complicated and theological and mystical in the last part, as the sin eater tries to tempt the hot young priest into becoming a sin eater. As it continues the corruption and ambition in the Catholic church, as embodied by the Cardinal, leads him to choose to quit priesting, with a side-order of celibacy is not for him, only to discover that the sin eater is just as bad. Maybe more? Anyway he chooses to try and create a new path, one of redemption.

Watch This: An inventive piece of Catholic horror fiction
Don’t Watch This: It seems awkwardly paced and over-explains the less interesting aspects while leaving the more interesting ones as bluffs or mysteries