The horror, suspense, thriller “Incarnate” has received terrible reviews so far.
It stars Aaron Eckhart who plays exorcism specialist Dr. Seth Ember, who comes to the aid of mother Lindsay (Carice Van Houten) whose young son Cameron (David Mazouz) is possessed by a demon named Maggie. Dr. Ember has been chasing after Maggie for quite some time because she is the one who killed his wife, his son, and put him in a wheelchair. Unlike most exorcism movies, Ember does not use traditional methods like Holy Water, Bible verses, and crosses. Instead he enter the possessed ones dreams. He does this by lowering his heart rate as much as possible until he gets as close to death as he can.
To prepare for his role Eckhart pretended to be a mentally ill, wheel chair bound, Vietnam War veteran. He went down to Venice Beach and yelled at anyone that passed by.
The movie only runs 1 hour and 27 minutes long, which is relatively short, compared to most modern movies, but it still found a way to drag. It reminds one of a pour mans “Inception” and the cast seems too stiff throughout. The writing comes off as a little lazy, lacking in important details that would help the viewer better understand the film.
Brett Gallman critic for “Oh The Horror” was not a big fan. “Given their absurdly prodigious output, I like to imagine Blumhouse just has stacks and stacks of scripts lying about. Likewise, you have to wonder if they don’t often Frankenstein together stuff, especially when confronted by something like “Incarnate,” which begins as the infuriating umpteenth riff of “The Exorcist” only to take a hard turn into a “Dreamscape” territory,” Gallman said. He then continued by saying, “it’s just too bad that it doesn’t feel like a calculated move so much as it seems like someone mixed up the script piles, leaving us with a half-witted effort that doesn’t nearly do its concept much justice.”
Fellow Movie critic Peter Sobczynski of rogerebert.com also had some unpleasant words about the film.
“What I can’t begin to fathom is why they decided that their latest effort, the dunderheaded demonic possession saga “Incarnate,” deserved just such a release. This film seems to have been designed to defeat even the most meager expectations one might have towards a cheap ‘Exorcist’ knockoff, released on one of the slowest movie going weekends of the year and with barely any warning,” said Sobczynski.
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of just 17% and on CinemaScore viewers gave it an average grade of just a “C-“ clearly not the results the producers were looking for.
The movie was directed by Brad Peyton and written by Ronnie Christensen.
“Incarnate” Opened Fri. Dec 2 and brought in $2,534,884 opening weekend finishing 9th at the box offices. It had an approximate $5,000,000 budget.