It was out of solidarity that I chose not to see Renny Harlin's The Exorcist: The Beginning when it was released last summer. No disrespect to Mr. Harlin, who has provided a few fine spectacles over the course of his career, but I wanted to see the serious horror film that was passed over by the studio in favor of a remake with more gore and pea-soup vomit; I wanted to see the Exorcist prequel that Paul Schrader had made, and which had been canned and then remade by Harlin. Special effects and blood are not in short supply in cinema, whereas serious theological explorations of evil most certainly are. Surely Schrader, who studied theology, who has written at great length about the films of Bresson, who adapted Kazantzaki's The Last Temptation Of Christ for Scorsese, whose conflicted Calvinist upbringing has pervaded all his work, would have provided this!

As it turns out, however, the studio was right. Schrader's film, now titled Dominion, has been released; and whatever personal triumph it represents for him, it also signifies a great error on his part. He failed, simply enough, to make a good picture.

As failures by consummate filmmakers generally are, Dominion is an interesting film to watch. One can sense where Schrader, working from a script by Caleb Carr and William Wisher, tried to create a strong and original film, one which would create its own broader interpretation of evil instead of merely predicating what was established in the original 1971 film. In fact, this is scarcely a prequel; Stellan Skarsgaard's Father Merrin bears relation to Max Von Sydow's in name and profession only, and the style and intent of the film are worlds apart from William Friedkin's skillful chiller.

In fact, Schrader's intent seems to exclude the requisite trappings of a film about Satanic possession altogether. He seems far more interested in the pervasiveness of a more general evil, one which does not require a specific human host, one that is far more subtle, and more troubling. Thus, the true climax of the film is not the stertorous fight between priest and demon but the long conversation that precedes it; the film I think Schrader really wanted to make would have had no demons at all, but simply men doing very bad things and other men unable to prevent those things from happening. In the movie's best scenes, he strongly suggests that evil is a contagious, latent presence - something that is inhuman, but not necessarily spiritual or supernatural. The World War II sequence that opens the film, in which a mass execution in a Polish village shakes Merrin's faith in a benevolent creator, is as good an example of this as there is.

But if Schrader puts his all into these ideas and their presentation, he does markedly less with the movie as whole. It is a remarkably languid film, poorly paced, poorly written; characters speak at great length about very little, and Schrader only intermittently suggests what should be a capacious sense of foreboding and dread. The narrative is punctuated by insultingly rudimentary jolts - a skeleton caught in the light of a flashlight, for example, accompanied by a musical stinger -and some incomprehensibly awful special effects. The animated hyenas that appear early on represent not just the nadir of modern CGI technology, but a disastrous choice on Schrader's part. Whatever plot point they provided is not worth the laughter their appearance causes. Elsewhere, he tries to fit some traditional Exorcist imagery into inane dream sequences that are neither scary nor important to the plot. Digging deeper into Catholic History, he provides an image of a young priest found strung to a tree, pierced by arrows - an effigy of St. Sebastian that is visually striking but seems to exist simply to prove that Schrader does in fact know his Catholic History.

I wonder if the film is, in fact, unfinished. The film print is ugly and dim, and looks like it was struck straight from a low-resolution digital copy, the type that might come directly from an editing suite; it's so irresolute that it's impossible to recognize the cinematography as the work of the great Victorio Storaro. One feels, watching it in the theater, as if one is watching a bootleg copy of a work-in-progress - but regardless of whether or not that's the case, Schrader is done with it, and the remarkable circumstances under which Dominion was made and released does not mitigate its failure. I wrote that perhaps the studio was right in their original decision to shelve the picture; I'd ratify that by suggesting that they were wrong to hire Schrader in the first place, and they were probably wrong too when they overcompensated by hiring Harlin. I think the film they wanted - regardless of whether it needed to be made - would have required a director who could make not a theological study, not a splatterfest, but a smart, scary, subtle thriller - someone like William Friedkin, who has wisely stayed far away from his original film. Incidentally, Friedkin created in the original Exorcist a sequence which contains many of the same elements of Dominion: I'm speaking of the opening of the film, which also found Father Merrin on an archeological dig in Africa, and which also featured a possessed boy, and which in five minutes created a more cohesive impression of fear and evil than this film does over the course of two hours.

To academics, or fans of Schrader's work, this film is of course indispensable. To everyone else, it's practically worthless, and I'd recommend in its stead a night at home, watching The Last Temptation Of Christ and Schrader's directorial masterpiece Affliction - the combined effect of which may be what he had a notion he might achieve here.