Trauma, Forgiveness and the Root of All Evil in Mickey Reece’s Agnes
Evil is in the eye of the beholder in Mickey Reece's Agnes (2021), which premiered this weekend at Tribeca Film Festival. You'd be forgiven for doubting that statement, what with the woman spewing vile filth while ripping flesh out of men's faces and making the shelves rattle and all, but bear with me here. By the time we get to the second half of the film, the script gets flipped from that of The Exorcist to something more like the final bus scene in The Graduate.
It wouldn't be the first time writer and director Mickey Reece has injected a healthy uncertainty into what otherwise seems ike a straightforward horror plot. Agnes is delivered in two halves. The film starts with world-weary Father Donaghue (Ben Hall) and soon-to-be priest Benjamin (Jake Horowitz) as they investigate a possible demonic possession at Saint Teresa convent. Half way through, the narrative shifts to that of Sister Mary (Molly C. Quinn) and her life after the incident, she left the convent but feels like perhaps the demon followed her out. Agnes marks the third film in Reece’s 'Strike Dear Mistress' trilogy – a group of films that focus in part on the horrors of not knowing how to channel pain and anxiety. You’ll be forgiven if you don’t know the names of the first two, Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart and Climate of the Hunter respectively, as Reece’s films are only just starting to appear on mainstream streaming services.
Reece doesn’t let something silly like genre expectations limit him – Agnes is a religious horror film that spends more time ruminating on trauma than it does on jump scares. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t lean hard into the horror aesthetic. Each scene is crafted with near pitch perfect tension, dramatic lighting and discordant music, all held together by slow push-ins that stalk each character like a sneaking predator. The titular Agnes (Hayley McFarland) spits, hisses and spews warp-voiced curses at those who dare to approach, her skin oozing and her hair approaching glam metal heights. Leaning into a slightly out of time retro vibe and winkingly self-aware dialogue, at its wackiest Agnes brings to mind something in the vein of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric. Or in the case of the leather-clad Father Black (Chris Browning), who gets called in as an expert when the demonic possession situation escalates, some straight up Garth Marenghi-style macho dorkitude.
Agnes plays directly into these tropes, using them to challenge our presuppositions of what evil actually looks like. Agnes’ fits, while decidedly not healthy, are merely a distraction from the more insidious evils of the others in the room. There’s the cruel and abusive Mother Superior who refuses to treat Agnes like a human at a time when she needs help the most. There’s Father Donaghue with his suspected past as a pedophile priest that everybody seems to comprehend with just enough tastefully detached disgust they can continue to overlook it. Then there’s Benjamin, blindly toeing the line of the institution without much question. In comparison, Agnes is nowhere near the most dangerous person in the room, just the only one with the most overtly manifest symptoms. It becomes clear that she only lashes out violently at those who deserve it – to all else, like her friend Sister Mary, she’s otherwise completely normal. Her demonic possession starts to feel less like a random infliction and more like the natural physical reaction to having been exposed too long to unseen evils.
This becomes clearer in the film’s second half, as the narrative shifts to the now ex-Sister Mary who, having since left the convent, is struggling to find her place in the regular world. There’s a real tonal whiplash as we move away from the self-satisfied indie filmmaking sensibility and find ourselves drowning in Mary’s world of sorrow. After years of trying to avoid her own painful past, the experience with Agnes created an awakening within her. She leaves the convent not because Agnes scares her but because she realizes, in a moment of quiet human connection between the two, how horrifying it was to see Agnes treated so inhumanely. But out in the world Mary starts finds herself even more depressed, chasing that high of true human connection and being continually let down by others’ selfishness – from a leering supermarket manager who keeps trying to use her to Agnes’ self-pitying ex-boyfriend, a mediocre standup comedian who projects a level of self-awareness he clearly doesn’t possess. Mary’s depression curdles into anger, revealing the root cause of Agnes’ problem – or possession, whichever you want to call it.
Like its characters, Agnes is buried under layers of contradictions wrapped in morality riddles. Which is perhaps a nice way to say it’s a fairly scattered film. There’s a lengthy commentary here on the perpetual cycle of trauma, and how to approach healing for a pain that cannot ever fully heal; resulting in an amusing metaphor that compares knowing God to eating a mediocre sandwich. Then there’s an even loftier musing on the classic contradiction of man’s duality, containing within ourselves a balance of both good and evil. It’s a contradiction Reece cleverly mirrors in the filmmaking itself – as these characters wrestle with lofty moral themes, the camera seems to continually drift off to the side to admire its own details. Expect a lot of inexplicable close ups of food and jewelry, or the pronounced sound of squeaking wheels and creaking furniture. It’s an ADD-style of filmmaking that does get a bit exhausting, but at least it doesn’t feel too random.
We cannot always control the experiences that happen to us, such as becoming a witness or victim to a disturbing event, but we can find stability in those that we choose to connect with. Direct personal communication is the true hero of Agnes – it’s the great secular seducer, a more immediate and concrete experience than learning how to achieve a spiritual connection with God. We’re all vessels, moving through inexplicable terror being afflicted upon us when we’re not inflicting it on others ourselves. The key is in having the wherewithal to achieve a balance.
