Halloween Horror: The Old Ways (2020)

Depending on your affection for and familiarity with exorcism films, Christopher Alender’s The Old Ways may seem admirably novel or hopelessly rote. It doesn’t waiver from the established narrative structure for exorcism films, nor does it have many inventive scares. But the film’s exorcism scenes are intriguingly specific in terms of setting and ritual. For instance, instead of involving dour old Catholic priests and helpless young virgin women in New England or other cosmopolitan parts of the United States, The Old Ways takes place in a remote part of Veracruz, Mexico and features a Nahuatl bruja, an Indigenous shaman with roots going back to pre-Aztec times. That particularity gives the film its animating spirit, even if much of it is by-the-numbers horror.

After a brief prologue set in the past The Old Ways jolts to the present as a woman (Brigitte Kali Canales) is woken up in a ramshackle hut. She’s tied up and seemingly a prisoner, but she doesn’t know why she’s there, and neither does the viewer. We soon learn her name is Cristina, that she’s a journalist from the States (but born in Veracruz), and that she’s being held prisoner by a local bruja, Luz (Julia Vera), Luz’s assistant, Javi (Sal Lopez), and Cristina’s cousin, Miranda (Andrea Cortés), who believe that Cristina has a demon inside her. They are going to purge the demon from within her, whether she likes it or not.

This opening is shockingly abrupt, offering no context or exposition about how or why the protagonist is where she is. We learn this information piecemeal over the opening 30 minutes of the film. While such an approach is theoretically intriguing in how it ties the viewer to Cristina, in actuality, it’s exhausting as it forces the viewer to spend much of the opening scenes simply understanding who and what is going on, instead of forming any emotional attachment to Cristina—which is presumably what the filmmakers intended. You almost feel like there’s something wrong with the streaming playback and the film has skipped forward 20 minutes over crucial scenes, but no, such abruptness is deliberate.

Luckily, once we get our bearings and Cristina starts to understand that her captors may have her best interests at heart, the film settles into an interesting stretch where we watch Luz, Javi, and Miranda perform several exorcisms on Cristina. The film depicts Luz’s rituals in meticulous detail. We watch Javi force Cristina to drink goat’s milk, Luz paint her face in mud and blood, read from ancient Nahuatl texts, and hammer nails into a wooden triangle at key parts of the ceremony. The sequences operate along the same principles as other exorcism films—there are recitations and actions at key points, much like a priest reading scripture and brandishing a cross—but the details of what is happening are specific to The Old Ways. Even if you’ve seen a bunch of exorcism movies, these sequences feel fresh.

There’s nothing particularly novel about the scares in these scenes—characters gnash teeth, levitate, thrash around the cell, and vomit up ghastly bile. But they’re effective, especially when we see fleeting glimpses of the demon possessing Cristina, who Alender only shows for brief moments from a corner of the cell shrouded in jet-black shadow. It’s also impressive when you realize midway through the film just how restricted its setting is. There are only a few sets in the film—Cristina’s cell, Luz’s home, a jungle cave that we see in flashback, and Cristina’s Los Angeles office which we also see in flashback. But the film never seems like it’s ultra low budget and hemming in its story in order to save money. You have to commend it for disguising its limitations so well and putting all the money on the screen in the set design and visual effects.

And yet, it’s too bad The Old Ways whiffs on some of the more important elements of successful filmmaking. I’m hesitant to lay a film’s failures squarely at the feet of a lead actor, but for whatever reason, whether miscasting, rote material, or a failure of direction on Alender’s part, Brigitte Kali Canales is not up to the challenge of the main role. It hurts that Cristina is saddled with trite “demons” in her character construction. For instance, we quickly learn that she’s a heroin addict and that she has a few last hits of heroin hidden on her in the cell, allowing her to stave off withdrawal during the early scenes. By having Cristina be a drug addict, we’re presumably supposed to assume that the “demon” within her is her addiction, and that the exorcism is some kind of elaborate way to sober her up. But such an approach has been done time and again in horror movies (notably in Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead remake), and in much more interesting ways than it is here.

Furthermore, Cristina’s heroin addiction seems just another way of reinforcing how much of a badass troublemaker she is supposed to be. A flashback sequence with her editor, Carson (played by frequent Ti West and Adam Wingard collaborator, AJ Bowen), builds her up as some kind of brilliant muckraking journalist, but we only ever hear about her being brilliant; what we see is her being a generic “strong female character” written in such a rote manner that it undercuts the specificity of much of the rest of the film.

In the end, for such an intimate horror film so centred on a single character, The Old Ways cannot overcome the weaknesses of the writing and performance of its protagonist. It becomes just another exorcism movie with a neat setting, some fun scares, and a forgettable overall effect—a diverting way to spend 90 minutes on Netflix, and nothing more.

5 out of 10

The Old Ways (2020, USA)

Directed by Christopher Alender; written by Marcos Gabriel; starring Brigitte Kali Canales, Andrea Cortés, Julia Vera, Sal Lopez, AJ Bowen.

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