One from the to watch pile…

St. Agatha (2018)

Film: Darren Lynn Bousman first fame to horror fans attention when he directed the first three sequels to the Leigh Whannel/ James Wan film ‘Saw’. He also surprised people with the unusual Repo: A Genetic Opera and a remake of Mother’s Day and The Barrens.

This is Bousman’s 2018 effort and is a bizarre mix of horror and crime who’s unusually confused state may be due to the fact that it has four writers… but is it good?

St. Agatha takes place in the 50s and tells of Mary (Sabrina Kern), a young con-woman who has been kicked out of home as she is responsible for the death of her brother as she was ‘with’ her conman boyfriend, Jimmy (Justin Miles), an episode of fornication which has resulted in her falling pregnant.

When a con goes wrong, they end up with no money, and to stop herself from being a drag on Jimmy’s capacity to earn money with his cons, Mary decides to move into a convent run by an oppressive Mother Superior (Cathryn Hennessy) who runs her convent with an iron fist and will take no objection to her cruel methods of control.

What Mary quickly realises though, is that the whole convent itself may be a con, and that there seems to be more going on with the wayward pregnant women that come for protection from the cruel world…

This film feels more like it should be some kind of made for TV period drama, but in Bousman’s hands, it becomes crueler, bloodier and more violent. There was certainly some strange visual decisions made. For example, there one scene where is a woman is forced to eat her own vomit, but there was a deliberate avoidance of actually visualising the act, and yet we get to see another scene where a nun chews food and spits it into another character’s mouth. I don’t understand why one of those things was seen to be over the top, and yet the other wasn’t.

The cast were pretty good, with Kern and Hennessy really holding the film together. The support cast of the other women staying in the convent were mainly pretty good, even though there was two choices where I initially couldn’t tell the difference between the two cast members.

Basically what I was hoping for with this film was something like Lucky McKee’s The Woods, but what I got was a washed out attempt at doing something like Pascal Laugier’s boring The Tall Man, but at least that had Jessica Biel and Stephen McHattie to make it appealing.

I could see what this film wanted to do, and hiring Bousman, whose Saw sequels are well-realised, was probably a great idea, but it just didn’t work. At all.

Score: *1/2

Format: This film was reviewed on the Australian release DVD from Eagle Entertainment and runs for about 98 minutes. The film is presented in a clean and clear 2.40:1 image with a decent Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.

Score: ***1/2

Extras: Nothing.

Score: 0

WISIA: Probably not.