The consensus seems to be that The Old Ways is pretty good. This folk horror, demonic possession film didn’t impress me too much, however. The premise is good: there is a ruin in Mexico that explorers leave having been possessed. They don’t know it. At the same time, it seems that the possession of Cristina, the protagonist, came from her mother. And she also visited the ruin. Most of the movie takes place in a room where a bruja and her adult son attempt to exorcise Cristina while her cousin Miranda watches. Things are a bit more complicated than that, however. Cristina has returned to her hometown with the intention of dying via a heroin overdose. Apparently the demon was luring her there to finish her soul. In any case, it felt quite confusing to me.
The story actually begins with Cristina finding herself held captive by a bruja named Luz. She insists that Cristina can’t go until the demon has been destroyed. Cristina feels fine, though, and doesn’t believe there is a demon. Meanwhile she’s able to smuggle in her heroin and uses it at night. But she also starts seeing what seem to be demonic entities. She escapes but finds that she can’t cross a line of salt. She’s forced to admit that she does have a demon and submits to a painful “old way” extraction. Luz performs the ritual—nothing like Exorcist style—and even performs surgery on Cristina with her bare hands. In the end, the exorcism leads to Luz’s death. Cristina prepares to go back to Los Angeles, but then discovers the demon has taken possession of her cousin Miranda.
Becoming a bruja herself Cristina performs the ritual on her cousin. The results are less dramatic but lead to a confrontation with a particularly nasty demon. The cousins together are able to destroy it. Meanwhile, Cristina’s boss has come looking for her and he too went to the ruin and has been possessed. Cristina prepares to do another ritual, the old way. There seems to be too much going on here and much of it is unfamiliar and therefore difficult to understand. It is a good example of religion and horror cooperating and the use of folk methods for handling a demon felt fresh. The eeriness of the situation is perhaps more uncanny than scary, but the biggest problem for me was that the origin of the possession kept shifting. There is a character (a little boy) who’s not really explained, but who isn’t a good sign. This isn’t a bad movie, but it made The Exorcist feel like old school.
