British filmmaker Christopher Smith is perhaps best known for 2009’s Triangle, a shipbound horror thriller whose narrative plays with the nature of time. Smith’s latest, Consecration, subjects viewers to similar kind of gamesmanship, as the film’s horror-tinged mystery is full of thematically resonant imagery related to eyes and mirrors—a welter of intensifiers tied to ways of seeing that insists that not all is as it seems.
Grace (Jena Malone) is an optometrist and atheist who, early in the film, receives the news that her priest brother has died in an apparent murder-suicide. In hopes of learning the truth, she sets out to the place where the incident occurred: a clifftop convent in Scotland with a propensity for extreme methods. While being driven to the nunnery by a police investigator (Thoren Ferguson), and against an aptly ominous backdrop of gray skies and jagged hills, Grace is told of an incident where a nun cut out one of her eyes in the wake of a demonic encounter.
Consecration isn’t particularly interested in the ambiguity of whether its horrors are imaginary or not. From the initially inexplicable opening scene, a flash-forward that finds Grace staring down the barrel of a gun held by a nun, all that seems to matter to the film is that something is afoot at the nunnery. When Grace arrives at her destination, the sisters are introduced muttering an ominous mantra and glaring at new arrivals from a window. Besides the police investigator, the only person even trying to keep up a façade of normalcy is a replacement priest played by Danny Huston, who quickly reveals that he didn’t set out to be cast against type.
The film’s brisk storytelling staves off boredom, if not frustration, given its shaky feel for character and setting. Rather than offer context about Grace’s past or the convent’s history at the outset, the script doles it out incidentally and when convenient. Jazzed up with showy visuals, the flashbacks that pepper Consecration might have taken on the outrageousness to which the film aspires if they weren’t so stubbornly in service of a rote murder investigation. In a soup of split diopters and references to other films, like the mirror shot from Contact, Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Smith’s own prior work.
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