Stigmata (1999)

Well, you know how it goes right? An innocent young girl possessed by a supernatural force, a priest with some severe faith issues, slash marks imposed by an unseen force, floating beds, blah, blah and blah. While those are indeed various scenes and concepts in the film “Stigmata”, and of course owing much to “The Exorcist”, I still found this to be a decent film of it’s own accord.

Frankie Paige is a young, club-hopping, trendy hairdresser whose religious background is non-existent at best. As a gift, Frankie receives a rosary (she thinks it’s a necklace) from her touristy mother, who purchased it in a small South American village. It’s in this village we’re introduced to Father Andrew Kiernan, a sort of miracle-buster who works for none other than the Vatican itself. Kiernan is there to investigate a statue that is supposedly bleeding from the eyes and hands, which the local villagers attribute to the recent death of a much beloved village priest. Kiernan, convinced the phenomena is indeed real, is mysteriously pulled from the case by his superior and assigned to a different one, in which a young lady in Pittsburgh is showing signs of the stigmata. This young lady is none other than Frankie herself, who, under various violent episodes, emerges oozing blood from various points on her body, ala the crucifixion of Jesus. Intrigued after talking to Frankie and examining her wounds, Kiernan is amazed to find out that Frankie is an atheist, as all people who have suffered from the Stigmata have been overly religious people. That’s not the only thing that differs from the phenomena, as it soon becomes apparent that someone or something is trying to send a message of some religious meaning through Frankie. Is it Jesus, Satan, Elvis…watch the movie and find out.

I’ll admit going into the movie I thought this was going to be Exorcist clone number 342, and was pleasantly surprised to find out I was wrong. It does have certain elements that are the same, but Frankie’s possession is much different than what happened to that little girl in Georgetown. The scenes of Frankie suffering from her affliction are fairly brutal to watch, as she progresses from wounds to the wrist, to the feet, the head (crown of thorns), back and last but not least…the dreaded Spear. Now, I don’t know about you, but after suffering through all the stuff that Ms. Frankie did, if someone told me the next “affliction” that was up was something called “The Spear”, then I put the gun to my head right then and there, burning for all eternity be damned. The film’s got that quick cut, edit, jump stuff ala an MTV video, and in some respects the editing took a lot away from the character development. There were some nice scenes between Frankie and Kiernan that were just starting to go somewhere when, “bang” she gets nailed in the feet or wherever by the “unseen force”. Could have been some real nice character development stuff going on there. Directors need to realize that some of us still have attention spans, and don’t need to be jolted awake by some flashy f/x every five minutes. The storyline of why this is all happening to Frankie was intriguing, but unfortunately is never developed to it’s fullest potential, and seems to just exist as a lame reason for the films events, and feels almost like a cop out at times. However, these minor bitchings aside, I did enjoy the movie. It moves along briskly, has an interesting story (which could have been better!) and is an overall decent waste of 90 minutes. Don’t compare it to “The Exorcist” and you’ll be fine.