‘Consecration’: Glasgow Review

Dir/scr: Christopher Smith. UK/US. 2022

British horror director Christopher Smith is back in the habit for his eighth feature; and not just because it’s largely set in a convent. This tale of a grief-stricken woman searching for answers to death of her priest brother mines some of Smith’s favourite themes — particularly the shapeshifting beasts of identity and memory. While Consecration leans heavily into the familiar cliches of holy horror, there’s some intriguing psychology at play; even if the film perhaps takes a little too long to reveal its most interesting aspects.  

While Consecration leans heavily into the familiar cliches of holy horror, there’s some intriguing psychology at play

Consecration opened in the US on February 10 through IFC Midnight (Shudder has taken US streaming rights) before screening in Glasgow Film Festival’s FrightFest strand. There’s not a great deal here to recommend the film beyond its core horror audience, but it should draw a decent genre crowd — including fans of Smith’s previous films which include Severance, Triangle and The Banishing.

In a genuinely creepy early sequence, young optometrist Grace (American star Jena Malone, doing her valiant best to control a tightly-clipped British accent) experiences a seemingly-supernatural presence in her home, just before the phone rings to inform her of the death of her estranged brother — a priest at a remote Scottish convent. Another body has been found and, with the police treating the case as a murder suicide, Grace travels to Scotland to try to discover exactly what happened.

It doesn’t take long for Grace to realise there’s something off at this isolated outpost, overseen by the devout, steely-eyed Mother Superior (Janet Suzman). Father Romero, (Danny Huston), a priest from Rome who has come to re-consecrate the convent after the violent deaths, may appear kindly, but his tendency to lapse into Latin, is – together with the nuns’ whisperings about “the darkness” – unsettling to say the least.

Grace’s deepening sense of discomfort is reflected in Elizabeth El-Kadhi’s sparse production design, which favours utilitarian order and cold conformity over any sense of comfort (interiors were shot at St Albans Academy, exteriors on The Isle Of Skye). Cinematography, from Rob Hart and Shaun More, lingers on the craggy shoreline, the ruins of the ancient chapel, a constantly-guarded door within the convent; framing is off-kilter, angles are vertiginous. Similarly, Nathan Halper’s well-used score rumbles with unease. Here, religion is not a refuge, but a weapon.

This idea of an ideological battle — between good and evil, past and present, heart and mind — is the most interesting part of the screenplay, written by Smith and Laurie Cook, who produced The Banishing. The more time Grace spends in the presence of these fervently faithful nuns, the more her own agnosticism is put under pressure. Her trust in herself slipping, she begins to seek sanctuary in ideas she previously dismissed.

While the film’s early sections are languid, the latter half ramps up the shlock levels – images of bright red blood against pristine white habits are pleasingly Hammer-esque. Malone’s performance, too, switches from virtually laconic to something rather more animated. Indeed subtlety becomes less of a concern as Grace begins having vivid memories, both of an abusive childhood she has tried to bury and of violent historical events that are somehow connected to the convent — and to herself. 

The final revelations may be visceral in their horror imagery, but they also shift into richer narrative territory. The answers Grace finds are perhaps not the ones she, nor the audience, were expecting, and throw everything that has come before into sharp relief.