Welcome to Mercy movie review (2018)

You can tell that there's something different about "Welcome to Mercy" from the way its terrific ensemble cast delivers their oft-pulpy dialogue. These performances are the heart and soul of a film whose ideas could have easily devolved into genre cliches and pseudo-empathetic pandering. "Welcome to Mercy" is, after all, a film where demonic possession is presented as an expression of Madaline's long-unexamined feelings of helplessness. Her secular trauma is given a high-concept horror twist, but with good reason: a world of old world religious/superstitious fear is the one this character was pre-emptively kicked out of, and that she consequently fears.

How can you blame her? Look at the way that Seglina and Juris Strenga, the actor playing the skeletal Father Joseph, play their parts. Their accents and appearances are (necessarily) off-putting: at times, she sounds like Frau Blücher from "Young Frankenstein" while he looks like the evil priest from "Poltergeist II." Still, there's enough humanity in both Seglina and Strenga's performances to make you wonder if Madaline knows what she's talking about when she dismisses both Joseph and Alyona's ritualistic faith as mere superstition. Listen to Strenga—as his character refers to the still-living Frank—add a syrupy pause worthy of Bela Lugosi to the sentence "He was ... a good friend." Or listen to Seglina deliver a master class in inflection as she--as Alyona rejects Madaline's claim that Yelina "abandoned [her]"—delivers a line that, from a lesser actor, would come out on the wrong side of Meryl-Streep-y camp: "I did not! A-ban-don YOU! I wanted to give you a BET-TER life.” 

That sort of pitch-perfect heightened tone is, admittedly, the sort of thing you have to see to believe. Still, the creators of "Welcome to Mercy" deserve praise for giving their story enough weight to make some timeworn horror conventions (Look out, stigmata!) seem new again. As a screenwriter, Ruhlin brings sensitivity to her characters in a way that none of the other authors of this season's big horror films did (sorry, fans of this year's "Halloween" sequel!). As a writer, Ruhlin gives Madaline enough time and humanity to worry: maybe she's unconsciously hurting her own daughter because she doesn't understand why or how much her mother hurt her. That lingering should help many jaded horror fans to suspend their disbelief, which is essential since Madaline (the audience's surrogate) must willingly submit to the prodding concern of the sisters of Mercy, a secluded convent whose nuns supposedly have the "spiritual disciplines" needed to help Madaline become unpossessed.

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