THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist selects the month’s weirdest home-ent releases
Illustration: Neil Edwards. Landmark
MICKEY REECE’S Agnes isn’t the exorcism movie you might expect from its first act, in which three priests — troubled, cynical veteran Father Donaghue (Ben Hall), devout apprentice Benjamin (Jake Horowitz) and excommunicated talkshow self-publicist Father Black (Chris Browning) — try to rid nun Sister Agnes (Hayley McFarland) of a possible demon. That doesn’t work out well for anyone and the film switches focus to Mary (Molly C. Quinn), a traumatised young nun who leaves the convent and finds herself in an outside world where she has to earn a living, even though she’s never learned basic skills like cashing a pay cheque and is viewed as easy prey by all manner of worldly folk. Like Reece’s unusual vampire movie Climate Of The Hunter, Agnes has moments of hilarity, horror, subtlety and strangeness.