THE OFFERING (2022)

Studio:     Decal
Director:    Oliver Park
Writer:     Hank Hoffman, Jonathan Yunger
Producer:  Jonathan Yunger, Jeffrey Greenstein, Hank Hoffman, Les Weldon, Yariv Lerner, Sam Schulte
Stars:     Nick Blood, Emily Wiseman, Paul Kaye, Allan Corduner, Daniel Ben Zenou, Sofia Weldon, Anton Trendafilov, Velizar Binev

Review Score:

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Summary:

Demonic activity plagues a Jewish funeral home, plunging an estranged family into a supernatural nightmare.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Believing he can bring back his dead wife Aida by conjuring the Archangel of Life, Yosille carves a sigil into his floor and performs a summoning ritual using a young girl, Sarah Scheindal, as a host. Yosille realizes he was actually tricked into summoning a shapeshifting demon that takes children when a beast appears and kills Sarah.

Some time later, Yosille performs another ritual to draw the evil entity into his body. To seal the demon, Yosille then stabs himself with a ceremonial knife. The supernatural spirit gets bound inside a stone pendant around Yosille’s neck.

Arthur Feinberg brings his pregnant wife Claire to visit his estranged father Saul, an Orthodox Jewish mortician who runs a family funeral home in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Close family friend Heimish, who assists Saul, is immediately suspicious of Arthur’s true motives for suddenly returning to make amends with Saul, who apologizes for having previously alienated Claire because she is not Jewish.

Yosille’s body is brought to the morgue in the basement of Saul’s funeral home. Left alone by his father to intake the corpse, Arthur removes the pendant from Yosille’s neck. A sudden scare frightens Arthur into dropping the pendant, which causes the stone to shatter on the floor. Arthur kicks the broken pieces into a drain to hide his accident from Saul.

Saul transcribes ancient script handwritten on the knife that Yosille used to kill himself. Unable to decipher the text, Saul contacts Chayim. Chayim identifies the text as various names for God written backwards, which would be used to summon a demon and seal it inside a human body. Chayim asks if there was also a pendant, which would be the physical bind, but Saul tells him he didn’t find one. Meanwhile, Claire experiences several frightful encounters with Sarah Scheindal’s ghost.

Heimish takes a call on Arthur’s phone that reveals Arthur needs his father to sign over the funeral home so he can secure a loan to save his own house. Heimish forces Arthur to confront Saul with the contract. Saul and Claire, who also didn’t know about the debt, each express anger and disappointment with Arthur.

That night, the demon kills Saul in the morgue. When Saul’s body is discovered the next morning, Heimish blames Arthur for the death by showing him that Saul’s final act was to sign the papers for transferring the property. Heimish quits working at the funeral home.

While seemingly entranced during his father’s wake, Arthur idly etches a strange symbol into a wooden chair. Later, Arthur has a troubling vision in which he carves a ceremonial sigil into the floor of the foyer.

Because Yosille’s death was a suicide, Arthur learns he needs police clearance to transfer the body. To close that loop, Arthur investigates Yosille’s apartment. Arthur finds the sigil on the floor along with a videotape revealing what really happened to Sarah Scheindal during the demon summoning ritual.

Yosille’s dead wife Aida seemingly visits Claire while she is alone at the funeral home. After taking the old woman down to the morgue to see Yosille’s body, Claire experiences sudden pain. Aida claims Claire has been cursed, but she can break the spell by burning the binding paper inside the broken pendant. Under Aida’s direction, Claire recovers the stone pieces from the floor drain. When she drops the broken stone and paper into a candle flame, however, Yosille’s body suddenly combusts. Aida transforms into a demonic beast, which causes Claire to flee back upstairs in terror.

Art returns home to find the foyer in disarray, Claire unconscious, and the sigil he carved in his vision on the foyer floor. An encounter with Sarah’s ghost reveals he is trapped in a time and space loop that prevents him from leaving the house.

Sarah’s ghost tells Arthur he needs to bring her another child in order to be freed. Instead, Arthur calls Heimish for help. After reviewing the videotape from Yosille’s apartment, Heimish brings in a rabbi, who instructs the two men in how to perform the demon-binding ritual.

In the morgue, the rabbi repairs the broken pendant. He then tells Arthur and Heimish that they will have to use the ceremonial knife to trap the entity. Arthur tearfully decides to willingly sacrifice himself in order to save Claire and their unborn child.

Paranormal activity suddenly kills the rabbi. As Arthur and Heimish prepare a protective circle to perform the ritual, the demon pulls Heimish away. More paranormal activity then pins Claire against a wall.

Arthur successfully summons the spirit into his body, but he is forced to crawl out of the protective circle to recover the dropped knife. Unable to reach it, Heimish seemingly recovers from the demonic attack and helps Arthur use the knife to stab himself. Just before dying, Arthur realizes he broke the circle, and the demon tricked him by taking on Heimish’s appearance when Heimish was really dead. Claire seemingly recovers in reality, but is then attacked by the demon too.

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Review:

During the 2022 Christmas season, one of the Hallmark holiday movies I watched was “The Holiday Sitter.”  The hook for this particular movie was that, instead of a traditionally attractive actress from a ‘90s TV show playing a workaholic woman who unexpectedly finds love while saving a small town business, the film starred Jonathan Bennett as a workaholic gay man who unexpectedly finds love after reluctantly returning to his hometown where he’s left alone to care for his niece.  Other than that sexuality switch, it was a standard Hallmark holiday story of meet cutes, quirky characters unhealthily obsessed with Christmas, momentary misunderstandings, and ultimately learning to sacrifice self-induced stress for what really matters most: romance and/or family.

After I got a fair way through “The Holiday Sitter,” I noticed that Bennett’s character’s homosexuality hadn’t received a mention.  It didn’t need to be since it was already understood.  It’s just that queer characters in mainstream movies often have a seemingly mandatory moment where their orientation gets acknowledged, either directly or as a questionable comedy bit that plays on a stereotype.  And so the thought occurred to me that it was refreshing to not see that status openly addressed at all for a change.  Finally, it seemed like an ordinary movie was saying, yeah, so what if he’s gay, that doesn’t mean we have to discuss it or do this any differently than we would if Jonathan Bennett were Danica McKellar or Lacey Chabert.

No sooner was I congratulating “The Holiday Sitter” for being progressive without blaring trumpets about it, Bennett’s character then did make a mention about how difficult his love life had been due to not being straight.  This bummed me out a little because I had been appreciating seeing gay characters normalized by not having their sexuality specifically spelled out in dialogue, only for that predictable thing to end up occurring anyway.

How does this have anything to do with “The Offering,” an atmospheric horror film in an Orthodox Jewish frame?  Well, whenever I cover horror movies with stories rooted in Judaism, I’ve noticed that I may call them out for not leaning hard enough into their cultural uniqueness, citing them as being too similar to Christianity-based terrors, just with rabbis swapped for priests and dibbuks swapped for demons.  But in light of how I had an inverse take on “The Holiday Sitter,” which was initially doing just fine without overplaying its hook, it occurs to me I could be a hypocrite regarding imaginary standards for representation.

After all, if the way to put gay leads on par with straight leads in holiday rom-coms is to not make sexuality a centerpiece until all audiences come to see them the same way, then maybe the way for Jewish horror to be even with every other paranormal possession movie is to forgive them for following formulas, and to let them be basic even when that means being redundant.  If following in familiar footsteps is how “The Offering” loses the “Jewish” to simply be regarded as “horror,” then maybe it doesn’t matter that its plot echoes “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” (review here), “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” (review here), or any number of other efforts where occult rituals invoke demons, and protagonists piece together a second ritual to banish an evil entity before it’s too late.

That’s what Arthur has to do after bringing his pregnant wife to Brooklyn to make amends with his estranged father Saul, who runs a family funeral home.  Saul’s basement morgue just took in a man who stabbed himself in a suicide.  What they don’t yet know, but will find out later when Arthur recovers a conveniently located videotape containing all the missing exposition he still needs, is that this man died as part of a pact intended to bind a shape-shifting spirit that murders children.  With the corpse’s presence unlocking a plague of paranormal activity that now haunts the house, Arthur becomes embroiled in a supernatural mystery that threatens to tear his family even further apart than they already were.

“The Offering” is mostly a mood movie.  Lights flicker.  Doors swing.  The camera creeps down dimly lit hallways toward a suspicious shadow, or cuts to show feet creaking on floorboards while someone hides under a bed.  On occasion, slow-burn suspense flares into an audiovisual cue such as suddenly waking from a nightmarish vision or editing into a ghost appearing out of nowhere.

Typical though its subdued spooks may be, “The Offering” serves them up with elegantly unsettling flair.  Every frame of the film comes packed with eye-catching detail, from intricate wallpaper patterns to interior architecture adorned with delicate engravings.  There’s a lot to look at, and the dread draws your attention with a complementary color palette of cold blues and warm brown tones, along with a fluid camera to keep eeriness constant using subtly mesmerizing movements.  Of all the movies whose buckets scoop water from the same well of exorcism/possession tropes, few are as finely crafted as “The Offering.”

Can the terrific textures of the movie’s cinematography, staging, and production design meet the criteria to earn a recommendation for viewers who enjoy engaging with patiently plotted suspense?  I think so.  Excellent acting adds dimension to routine family drama.  Creature design and fiery FX turn up the heat on scares with otherwise low temperatures.  Does “The Offering” need more to bump it over the line of being a casual haunter whose most distinguishing mark comes from its Orthodox Jewish overlay?  Maybe its religious aspect shouldn’t come into consideration.  As I seem to be coming around to consider, maybe a polished presentation is merit enough for an average story to earn an above average grade.

Review Score: 70

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