Just about every website that has anything to do with film news is covering the story of the new cast members for the movie The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel. However not everyone is focusing on the possible storyline based on true events.
You’d think from the title we’re talking about an Exorcist type movie, and you’d be right. Oh…ermmm…well not that intriguing after all…but wait.
This 22-year-old woman was a student at the University of W√جø¬Ωrzburg and in the late 1 970s exhibited symptoms — including spasms, writhing, speaking in devilish tongues — construed by her devout Catholic family as diabolic possession. The archbishop of W√جø¬Ωrzburg concurred with their diagnosis and entrusted two priests to perform the Exorcism from the 17th-century Rituale Romanum. To the embarrassment of the church, the victim died of starvation during the procedures, for the exorcists had added the discipline of fasting to the other means of driving out the demons. Insult was added to embarrassment when the district attorney’s investigation and a trial found the two priests guilty of negligent manslaughter.
There are many places around the Interweb that carry details of this story, but it’s hard to find ones that match or that take a common view. That paragraph, taken from The Institute for Psychological Therapies is the only decent reference I could find.
However, this does show that the events of this poor girls death make a compelling story however you look at it, but the movie treatment seems to leave a lot to be desired. As the rather worrying plot summary shows at IMDB:
A bitter and repressed single lawyer (Laura Linney) takes on the church and the state when she fights for the life of a priest who performed a deadly exorcism on a young woman. Linney must battle the cocky state lawyer as well as her own lonliness, as she realizes that her career so far has not fulfilled her, nor is she happy in her job on a day to day basis.
Ah, wonderful. I really do hope that this isn’t the real plot. Firstly belittling such an important story focusing on the performance of bitter lawyer and her own problems is far from the controversial story that this really was. I mean this brought two worlds clashing together, that of the Church and the Law, and without relying too much on clever puns, the Law won.
I really do hope they investigate what happened to the poor girl, did the Church kill her with their over zealous and antiquated practices when she was suffering from a curable or at least controllable mental illness. Or was she truly the victim of a demonic possession, abandoned by science and her memory and family destroyed by our modern practices we call Justice? Please, let the film show some intelligence and take us to those questions.
