Incarnate ★★½
IN featuring a former Australian rugby league player as Satan, low-budget horror film Incarnate is unique in at least one way.
Matt Nable is now a familiar face on local television, but I think this is his first Australian-made feature film.
His performance mirrors the film in that he has a couple of good scenes early but the rest is completely familiar and predictable.
The 2016 film is competently made and has a good premise. Following the deaths of his wife and son by a drunk driver, a scientist devotes his life to exploring the paranormal.
He develops a psychic ability to enter the mind of a possessed person where he tries to convince the innocent victim to turn away from the demon’s control. This mind battle is presented an an alternate universe with the scientist and the demon in human form.
Unfortunately, apart from some good jump scares, an underlying tension or sense of dread is missing.
It’s not fair to compare Incarnate to the greater horror film ever made, The Exorcist, but I’m going to anyway. There is a scene when the scientist, Dr Ember, first enters the room where a possessed boy is being kept and the child utters his name.
Compare the tension to The Exorcist’s scene when Father Merrin first arrives and you’ll see what I mean. There is no comparison, but the makers of Incarnate could have tried a little better.
So, a kernel of an interesting idea just can’t be nurtured by director Brad Peyton and writer Ronnie Christensen. Peyton made the action/disaster film San Andreas in 2015 by Christensen hasn’t written anything worth noting before this script…and I guess still hasn’t (ouch!).
Dr Ember is played by Aaron Eckhart, a good, generally dependable actor (best roles: In the Company of Men, Thank You For Smoking) who occasionally goes off the rails with his choices, i.e. Incarnate and 2014’s I, Frankenstein.
David Mazouz has a few good moments as the possessed Cameron but Catalina Sandino Moreno looks frankly ridiculous as the best looking Vatican Emissary you are ever likely to see.