Film Review: The Offering (2023)
When I started reviewing The Pope’s Exorcist and then turned the review into a comparison between it and Exorcist: The Beginning, I also complained about how I felt that movies featuring demonic shenanigans were becoming stale. Well, my prayers were answered by The Offering (2023), whose Orthodox Jewish setting was an even bigger departure from the usual Catholic fare. Warning: SPOILERS.
Art has returned to New York with his non Jewish wife Claire, who’s pregnant with their first child, in the hopes of reconciling with his disapproving father, Saul. He also hopes to convince Saul to let him use his house/funeral home to be able to keep his and Claire’s new home, which is at risk of being taken away by the bank. To an already tense situation, the movie adds Heimish, a friend of Saul’s who doesn’t trust Art’s intentions, and a corpse with an engraved knife and a mysterious pendant. As the living argue, an ancient malignant force sneaks around, making them see and do things, with two goals: to fully revert the ritual trapping it in the dead body, and get Claire’s unborn baby. For she is Abyzou, the Taker of Children…
The family drama is both touching and frustrating, filled with misunderstandings, old grudges, and things left unsaid. From what the movie shows, Saul did behave terribly when Art chose Claire, but he’s changed and also acknowledges that he didn’t handle the illness and death of his wife well. Except he tells this to Claire and not Art, who’s still mad about how cold his father acted towards him. And Art didn’t intend to trick Saul into selling his home - he just didn’t get the chance to ask him before Heimish found out about it. However, he ends up not telling him any of this because Saul has a heart attack after Abyzou reveals herself to him. I guess this makes The Offering Elevated Horror, but while I do like to have proper characters rather than tropes in my horror, I’m here mostly for the demon, and unlike ineffectual Asmodeus in The Pope’s Exorcist, Abyzou gives Pazuzu some serious competition.
The movie begins in a messy house, with piles of old books scattered around, spooky writing on the walls, and a scared old man, Yosille, killing a chicken so he can reduce it to ashes to make a protective circle. But what is he protecting himself from? First, we see a creepy little girl who wants to be fed, then Yosille’s sick wife, Aida, who asks him to stop whatever ritual he’s trying to perform. The little girl offers him his dead wife back and he seemingly accepts. However, it was only a ruse to get her to possess him so he could trap her in his dead body. And it worked, until the body ends up in Saul’s funeral home and Art removes the knife and breaks the pendant. He also kicks it into a grid, which means that when a concerned Saul calls his Cabalist friend, Chayim, he’s told everything is fine because if there’s no pendant, there’s no accidentally freed demon. The haunting is a mix of jump scares, flickering lights, opening doors, spooky sightings, and the little girl asking Claire for help. Instead of freaking out about the fact that she’s hallucinating and run to the nearest doctor like you should do if you start seeing things, she becomes convinced it’s a ghost reaching out. For some reason, the movie doesn’t do much with this, instead bringing in Aida when it’s time for the last bit of trickery to break Yosille’s ritual. Abyzou also gets inside Art’s head and makes him carve a symbol on an armchair and an elaborate ritualistic circle on the floor of the entrance hall. This all seems disconnected and aimless… until you get to the end.
In addition to spooking people to death and making them deface furniture, Abyzou can also melt writing, including the instructions for the disposal of Yosille’s body, which prevents Art from handing it over and makes him go to the dead man’s place in search of a possible next of kin who can claim it. There, he finds a spooky recording about how the demon affected Yosille’s mind, and a video tape showing a ritual involving the little dead girl. Yosille had been trying to contact his dead wife when he found Martiel, the Archangel of Life, who apparently told him that only a little girl’s prayers would work. So, Yosille made her stand inside the same circle Art carved on the floor, and after an adorable beginning where ‘Martiel’ makes the little girl levitate, things take a much darker turn that ends with the little girl dead and a brief view of something that looks nothing like an angel, Biblical or anthropomorphic. Meanwhile, dead Aida shows up at the funeral home and tricks Claire into destroying what was left of the binding ritual, and we get another glimpse of Abyzou’s true goatish form. The movie is clever enough never to show it in broad daylight, but sadly not clever enough to not add a scene where a goat-like Abyzou crawls up a wall. Please, please, no more wall crawling. And while I get that it’s easier to show her as Aida, why would Abyzou not be in her true form when she’s playing cat and mouse with Claire? I was going to add her appearing like the little girl when trying to convince Art to give her a child in exchange for Claire, but it’d probably be easier to convince him looking like that than a sinister, freakish, anthropomorphic goat. After refusing Abyzou’s deal, Art calls Heimish who calls Chayim, who tells them that they’re dealing with a very ancient evil and connects Abyzou to God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, as that was how she was trapped. I liked the Biblical background, but didn’t Abraham end up not killing his son? Because the way it was told, it sounded like they did the same thing as Yosille. Regardless of what happened with Abraham, according to Chayim, the only thing they can do is trap it again using Yosille’s ritual. This, of course, means that someone is going to have to kill themselves with the engraved knife. The Cabalist also tells them that Abyzou is a shapeshifter, which will be promptly forgotten by Art, and that the circle he carved on the floor is a sacrificial altar and whoever ends up there is an offering to Abyzou. Anyway, the demon correctly guesses that Chayim is the only one who knows what he’s doing and swiftly kills him. That leaves Art and Heimish, until the latter gets dragged away. Art struggles to finish the ritual on his own as demonic winds or maybe some demonic telekinesis? threaten to throw Claire off the entrance hall window. It’s all very dramatic and tragic with a still alive Heimish (Chayim said Abyzou was a shapeshifter, Art!) helping Art stab himself while Claire watches. Except Heimish was really Abyzou, who is now free to roam the world looking for children. Demon Heimish leaves, ignoring Claire, who saw her husband die in front of her for nothing. It’s a bittersweet ending and far better than The Pope’s Exorcist, which left everyone alive and well. Except, that wasn’t the ending.
Claire wakes with a start, still hiding under a table. The sun is shining, the house is fine, and there’s no hint of ancient demonic presences anywhere. A very much alive Art arrives and she happily runs to greet him. At this point, I was ready to go on a rant about It Was All A Dream endings, and how of course the movie had had no problem showing a more tragic ‘final’ sequence knowing that it would all be undone. Usually, when there’s some clunkiness involved, I wait for the twist since this can’t just be how it ends. In this case, however, I didn’t. The truth is that, while I’ve seen plenty of tragic horror movies that end with everyone or at least the lead dead, Claire being pregnant convinced me she was off limits. The movie couldn’t possibly go that far… but it did. That’s not really Art and the house isn’t really fine. The sacrificial altar real Art carved on the floor is still there, and Claire stepped right into it… There’s a final jump scare when Abyzou returns to her true form and lunges at her offering, but that doesn’t matter - what matters is that she got what she wanted and this twist almost compensates for the wall crawling. Almost.
THE POSSESSION (2012)
The Offering wasn’t the first movie I saw featuring Abyzou - that was The Possession (2012). Like this one, it features lots of family drama and some Jewish folklore, but it’s pretty much a standard possession movie that sees the ancient demon being accidentally freed and taking up residence inside a teenage girl. I don’t remember this Abyzou doing much apart from ransacking the fridge, filling the house with moths, and acting mean. There were some creepy moments, like when you see the demon inside the possessed girl's throat, but it wasn’t a good movie. Abyzou was only fully seen in the end, after the Jewish exorcism (which apparently involves olive oil and yelling a lot) and she looked like a deformed toddler. Worse, despite spending all that time with the family of her victim, she didn’t kill any of them, not even when the father threw away the special box where she’d been trapped! Very disappointing.
VERDICT
The Offering is what Exorcist: The Beginning and The Pope’s Exorcist might’ve been if they hadn’t been so attached to the possessed child trope. And, no, it’s not like The Autopsy of Jane Doe. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s spooky, the Orthodox Jewish setting was a nice departure from the usual Catholic stuff, the ending is one of the best I’ve seen in a while, and Abyzou (at least this incarnation) is a great addition to the ancient demons' cinematic pantheon.
By Danforth