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| Directed by Rupert Wainwright; Starring Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne, Nia Long, Jonathan Pryce, Patrick Muldoon, Mark Adair Rios, Rade Sherbedgia, and Portia de Rossi |
Stigmata is one of those films that you sit through and think off all the better films you have seen that the film is stealing from. The entire last half of Stigmata looks like a shot for shot retry at The Exorcist. It may not owe as much as to other films as The Astronaut’s Wife (Species II meets Rosemary’s Baby meets Contact meets Devil’s Advocate) or The 13th Warrior (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves meets Beowulf meets Willow meets Empire Strikes Back) or Brokedown Palace (Return to Paradise meets Midnight Express meets Red Corner meets Paradise Road), but Stigmata does cliff from quite a few films (the Nashville Scene mentioned references to The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Mommy Dearest, and Every Which Way But Loose). Stigmata is not a truly terrible film, but a flawed film from all the heavy stealing it has done. It is like a Brian DePalma film gone overboard, Truffaut film without the edge; it is truly a Rupert Wainwright film, the man who brought us Blank Check.
Stigmata follows the occurrence of a stigmata in a normal atheist woman. Frankie (Arquette) has a life that she adores, working as hair stylist in the day and partying all night. Then strange things begin to happen to her: cuts appear through her wrist, lacerations take over her back, and she loses the ability to think for herself at times. It is almost as if she is possessed by the devil, but she is in fact possessed by a very unhappy priest. The cuts to her are seen by a Catholic leader (Pryce) in the Vatican as yet another hoax in which a person is trying to look like a stigmata for attention. Still he sends his chief Vatican investigator (Byrne) to see what is happening. The occurrences look to him to be much more than attention want, especially after he sees her take in more cuts and changes in personality and facial features.
The film does have interesting moments throughout, it is just that they never really amount to anything. When she eerily speaks in an ancient dialect with a wrinkled face and rolled-up eyes, the scene looks good and helps the movie, until it tries to explain what is happening quickly and ruins the mood. Wainwright is simply an awful director, he does not even know when he has a good scene in which he can savor and leave untarnished. I thought that the actors all gave pretty good performances, especially Byrne and Arquette who looked to have taken quite the physical beatings in production. The film does have something going for it until it reaches its halfway point, then everything goes downhill, leading to a terribly stupid climax and an even worse finale.
Stigmata is not the worst wannabe horror film this year, thanks only to some almost good moments.
