"Deliver Us from Evil" (Documentary) (2006) - Movie Review

When I watch a film which talks for/against/about/around religion I hesitate to pen the words. It is in hesitation of being offensive or taking a more subjective stands on this reviewer’s belief in the topic. The cessation in the flow of sentences does occur in the diurnal writing of any film but the magnitude of this cult, sect, followers of this thing called as religion is immeasurable and the human psychological inhabitance, acceptance and offense is far fetched than the least of one would be able to comprehend in his/her term of life. “Deliver Us from Evil” is not about religion but about governance which delegates it and how it has failed and failed again in administrating it through deception, negligence and victimization.

A priest in his term of being one, Oliver O’Grady in the varied places of various churches sexually abused hundreds of children. But the passing days of that memory and an injustice which happened to them being aided in the concealment of the people, institution and in turn their belief is an equally incomparable pain to the victims. The soft spoken and a man in complete control of his senses and action during the interview, Oliver O’Grady tells us how much of an instant attraction he was among many Catholic families. He says he needs closure in so many sweet terms and his hold towards reality and his actions are articulated with an openness and acceptance in the interviews that the sanity of him comes to question in the lucidity of his crimes and opinions. At the end of the film, we learn him as an ardent follower of religion which he considerably negated when he was exploiting the children under the same roof he shamelessly resided for shelter, comfort, care, respect and belief.

It is a dictation from him who has served his seven years sentence in an US prison and currently is in Ireland free to roam. The film originates taking him as the one case study of a much wider and bigger problem the organization of Catholic administration faces and its dealing of it. It tells how the victims were preyed by the confidence he gained as a representative of a much revered doctrine the parents wanted their children to grow up with. The film’s director Amy Berg takes on the bigger picture pretty well from the start. The origination of such event if would have been dealt in the correct manner would have stopped potential victims been not encountered with his person. Instead the head clergies of Bishops orchestrated a scandalous settlement of relocating the trouble than to solve it. He is jumped from places to places when accusations emerged eventually bursting into the final conviction of him to be sentenced for seven years.

Seeing him objectively as a person taking much strain to not bring the image of the victims, it is a disorder which should have been taken care of by him as a person seeking personal help but a person whose urges take precedence over a well being of an innocent and bare to even speak up child is an expectation in perils. This is a failure of an administration over which a much number of people have their hopes, life, character and belief upon. Is this a greater good the powers of it is shielding the infamy so that to appeal to the existing and an attraction to the fresher people on this religion? It is an act of saving one’s own life and the collective representation of it is in the administration.

In this documentary we see a seeker and a fighter for truth Father Tom Doyle who tries to condone and appeal to the system which he is bound to. There is a doubt of not hearing the other side of this chronicles of the concealment from the people of the Vatican itself only to learn later that no one wanted to provide an interview. Even the victims are stopped in submitting or an approach to meet the pope for their grievance.

The religious view of the film is considerably lesser than the inhuman nature of the powerful people in practicing it. It is not an anti-religion film even though one of the victims and another of victim’s father have lost the faith, but it is as some one might take a magnifying glass over a government betraying its people takes on a similar establishment. But this one is a betrayal of unfathomable magnitude in content. It is a betrayal of a belief nurtured right from as a child and how it fails every time when there is no reasonable account or evidence for solving the problem than to hide it under the rugs. There is a statement from a victim about the religion stating that the deviation of it long ago in eons would have taken place by humans which has basically removed the principles and goodness it was built upon.