Halloween Week: Stigmata (1999)

2 years ago

Halloween Week: Stigmata (1999)

LOSING MY RELIGION

by Erica Ulstrom

There are two genres of scary movies that I won’t watch: those portraying children as the killers and those that are uncomfortably blasphemous (I know, you probably haven’t heard that word since your Aunt Rose scolded you at communion in 1986; I’m unfashionably earnest and old – cut me some slack). And a third group - the mindless slasher and gore horror flicks - simply doesn’t interest me.

But I’ll tell you this: give me a scary movie that makes me think, or that manipulates my own realistic fears, and I am done sleeping. Blair Witch terrified us because of what we don’t understand; it tapped into our primal, if subconscious, fear of a dark forest – our basest suspicion that something too wild controls the woods. It was all shadows and sticks, noises and unknown places, men facing away from the camera in some horrifying submission we didn’t comprehend. And I think the movie’s acknowledgment of that fear, and even justification of it, is what left me too unnerved to camp for a good year after I saw it.

In that vein, Stigmata is an unusually scary movie that kind of spellbinds me.

In this case, it’s our subtle fear, avoidance, and unbearable attraction to God – or our perception of God - that is so relatable. Gabriel Byrne’s character, Father Kiernan, is a Jesuit priest and a scientist for the Vatican. He’s responsible for investigating miracles – spiritual apparitions, visions, divine occurrences – and validating or negating them on behalf of the Church. The irony, of course, is that his duty as a scientific doubter – and his chief objective to disprove the potentially miraculous – runs in direct conflict with his avocation as a man of faith. Beautiful stuff, right?

We first find Father Kiernan outside of Sao Paolo, Brazil where he has been sent to investigate an approximation of the Virgin Mary that turns out to be a mere rust stain. While there, however, he stumbles upon a statue of the Virgin Mary which has been weeping warm blood since the death of the parish’s beloved Father Almedia.

Despite the rare swelling of Kiernan’s hope and suspicion that he has discovered the legitimate, the Vatican is disinterested – hostile almost – and inexplicably orders him home. We sense there is something about this particular act of God that they’d prefer not acknowledge or publicize.

Enter Patricia Arquette’s Frankie Paige – an irreverent party girl in Philadelphia and self-confessed non-believer who begins displaying signs of Stigmata (the spontaneously re-enacted wounds of Christ at the Crucifixion). We learn that Frankie’s mother purchased Father Almedia’s rosary on the Brazilian black-market after his death and sent it home to Frankie (admittedly a slightly cheesy devise that, along with an occasional excess of blood, is my only real complaint about this movie - but I understand how it ties the plot together and so can’t complain too much.)

Frankie’s afflictions soon worsen from pierced wrists to lacerated back to scars from a crown of thorns. Father Kiernan is dispatched from Rome to investigate. He concludes an initial interview abruptly after learning that Frankie is not Catholic and does not even attend church - informing her that Stigmata only chooses the deeply devout. Those whose reverence and faith is so profound it can only express itself in some kind of physical manifestation of empathy for Christ.

As Frankie’s symptoms worsen and she begins displaying signs of some sort of spiritual inhabitation (speaking and writing prophesies in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his contemporaries, for instance) Father Kiernan is drawn in. Despite the dogmatic definition of Stigmata and its preference for the holy, there’s no denying that for some reason, it has chosen to take control of the unworthy and disinterested Frankie.

Early on, you could be forgiven for judging this movie as another shallow or titillating film on satanic possession or the occult.

But in time, you start to notice ribbons in the weaving of the plot that are much more complex. We come to learn that Father Kiernan doesn’t pray any more. That he is questioning his faith in God and has all but lost it in the Church. And that for a Man of the Cloth, he has an alarming if appropriately resisted level of chemistry with this beautiful young woman. And for all her bravado, we find that Frankie is as susceptible to God and as worthy of His possession as any of the Vatican hierarchy; Maybe more so.

The movie’s conspiracies and Church cover-ups could be formulaic entertainment alone, but I was impressed by how the plot becomes a metaphor for the Truth the Catholic powers are attempting to suppress. There’s no M. Night Shyamalan level of reveal, so I don’t think I’m spoiling the film to admit that ultimately the Church is fighting to stifle and discredit an alleged gospel of Jesus – written in his own words - discovered in Northern Egypt six decades ago. The audience eventually learns that Father Almedia has possessed Frankie with Stigmata to draw the Church and the world’s attention and to demonstrate his belief in this gospel and its message:
“I am in you and all around you, not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of wood and I am there.”

Father Almedia’s immortal, dire desire is for the world to hear what he estimates is God’s own cry for the Church to remove itself as a barrier between man and God. What better way to illustrate this available, egalitarian love than through a disenchanted priest and a disbelieving miscreant?

I love the power that sweeps through the film – the strength of God’s own righteous fury at those who have misrepresented Him and distanced us, which is terrifying and mesmerizing. And I love the grace that settles in the end of the movie, how Frankie becomes as pure and valuable as the Virgin herself.

In its sum, Stigmata is such an effective commentary about what we believe and why we believe it – about who we allow to define or misroute our belief. It’s a film about losing your faith and running from God - and the fearsome yet comforting idea that He might be able to find you anyway, and inform you that you’ve misunderstood His terms.

There is a John Donne sonnet I’ve always loved for the same reason. It’s Donne’s cry for God to be less patient and passive with our fickle hearts – for Him to subvert institutions and overtake us if He is true, if He wants us:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Woven discreetly into a film that definitely meets all requirements for fear-inducement this Halloween is the surprising notion that faith is larger than any of us and yet intimate enough to be just you in your complete worthiness and Him in his furious, unrelenting, righteous desire for you. If the power of that theory doesn’t make you think and unnerve you a bit, then you may be more comfortable sticking with Saw or Friday the 13th.

Erica Ulstrom is a guest contributor to Filmosophy, who last wrote about High Fidelity in these pages. Erica writes, works in non-profit development, and plans travels from Minneapolis. She tumbls here.