Dis­cov­er the rad­i­cal world view of this apoc­a­lyp­tic exor­cist movie

Sleep­ing rough near a ceme­tery on the out­skirts of Barcelona, elder­ly Eloy de Pal­ma (Lluís Mar­co) tells his teenaged grand­daugh­ter Alba (Clàu­dia Pons) a camp­fire sto­ry from his own boy­hood: in the vil­lage of Alba’s great grand­par­ents, the ceme­tery became a place of ghost­ly unrest short­ly after the old priest, hav­ing served the com­mu­ni­ty for 50 years, died and was buried there; when the peo­ple unearthed the priest to move his corpse to anoth­er grave­yard, they dis­cov­ered that he had in fact been a she all along. ​“Even the rest­ing souls”, Eloy con­cludes, ​“rebelled against that abom­i­na­tion, when they were forced to share the scared ground with her.”

“I still think it’s not that bad,” com­ments Alba, who regards the patri­ar­chal tra­di­tions of the Catholic church with a modernist’s scep­ti­cism. After all, Alba is her­self, as Eloy con­cedes, ​“also a woman – young, but a woman nonethe­less”. She may be fol­low­ing a devout, Bible-tot­ing, white-beard­ed grand­dad­dy wher­ev­er he leads, and pur­su­ing a pre­scribed des­tiny to which she has had to sac­ri­fice any­thing like a reg­u­lar girl­hood, but she is also, in her way, herald­ing a fem­i­nist rev­o­lu­tion that will turn ancient gen­dered ortho­dox­ies on their head – and she exhibits mirac­u­lous pow­ers that might just mark her as the new mes­si­ah for a New Age.

We know this New Age is com­ing, because ​‘s fea­ture debut Asmod­ex­ia is for­mal­ly struc­tured around a three-day count­down to ​‘the Res­ur­rec­tion’, set for 21 Decem­ber 2012 – in keep­ing with the escha­tol­ogy of the ancient Mayan cal­en­dar. As the day fast approach­es in an unsea­son­ably hot pre-Christ­mas peri­od, this odd-cou­ple grand­fa­ther and grand­daugh­ter walk the land with a pious sense of pur­pose, along the way lib­er­at­ing var­i­ous lost souls from pos­ses­sion through exor­cism rit­u­als – while a mys­te­ri­ous leather-clad fig­ure tracks them from a dis­tance in a black van.

Just where Eloi and Alba are head­ed, with what inten­tion, and ranged against pre­cise­ly what ene­my, is grad­u­al­ly pieced togeth­er as we wit­ness not only their apoc­a­lyp­tic progress, but also an inves­ti­ga­tion by police inspec­tor Diana (Mar­ta Bel­monte) into the strange trail that they leave in their wake, flash­backs to a hap­py-clap­py cult that Eloy led in Chi­a­pas 15 years ear­li­er, and a par­al­lel sto­ry about a clair­voy­ant woman, Ona (Irene Mon­talà), locked in a Barcelona asy­lum where pan­de­mo­ni­um is rapid­ly break­ing out.

The exor­cism movie mar­ket is a crowd­ed one, and most films on this theme fol­low in the foot­steps – with­out ever quite man­ag­ing to fill the shoes – of William Friedkin’s peer­less The Exor­cist. Accord­ing­ly, Asmod­ex­ia is all the more wel­come as an addi­tion to this sub­genre for being such a rad­i­cal depar­ture from its pre­de­ces­sors. Alba may be only a lit­tle old­er than Lin­da Blair’s Regan, and may sim­i­lar­ly be strug­gling with an ado­les­cence that has turned her body into the bat­tle­ground for a ver­i­ta­ble Armaged­don, but here it is not her head, but the viewer’s, that will be spin­ning. For this film, the ​“reverse side” of its mod­els, leaves us con­stant­ly strug­gling to ori­ent our­selves in an unfold­ing sce­nario that, though seem­ing­ly famil­iar, takes a digres­sive, mean­der­ing nar­ra­tive path with no few­er twists and turns than the road walked by Alba and Eloy. The dev­il is in the details of a deft­ly ambigu­ous screen­play (by Car­reté and Mike Hos­tench) that care­ful­ly with­holds as much as it reveals.

In the end, every­thing is illu­mi­nat­ed in a sat­is­fy­ing way, and even that title, at first so emp­ty of any obvi­ous ref­er­ence, acquires a cer­tain sig­nif­i­cance (that it would be ungod­ly to spoil). Per­haps the film’s great­est trick is to sug­gest that its events pre­cede our view­ing of them, and so to insin­u­ate the idea that the new world to which Asmod­ex­ia opens the door is exact­ly where we are all liv­ing now. Some, no doubt, will be trou­bled at the way the film fem­i­nis­es an old men’s tale while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly demon­is­ing its own fem­i­nism. Oth­ers, though, will shrug and con­clude, along with Alba, ​“I still think it’s not that bad.” After all, any act of rebel­lious icon­o­clasm demands an inver­sion of the norms and val­ues enshrined in the sta­tus quo – and in trans­form­ing the tropes of a well-estab­lished genre, Asmod­ex­ia also sly­ly upends our world view.

Asmod­ex­ia is released on DVD by Sharp Teeth Films 28 March.