The Rite available on Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD, On Demand and for Download as of 5/17.
From the start, The Rite, directed by Mikael Håfström and written by Matt Baglio and Michael Petroni, seems to present a duel personality. The press release tells us that the story was inspired by true events involving exorcism. However, all the trailers for it gave audiences the impression that The Rite was going to be a gore-filled horror movie. Given this dichotomy, the best way to approach watching The Rite on DVD or Blu_ray is not expect too much of either of these aspects. What you can expect is a that Anthony Hopkins is the best part of this movie. He fully immersed himself into the character of Father Lucas Trevant and the world of exorcism to bring a sense of how underlying yet often urgent the battle between good and evil is.
Going back to the dichotomy of The Rite, for me the movie felt more like a drama dealing with faith than a horror or thriller type movie. The scary elements were very mild for what you would expect of movie dealing with the issue of supposedly real demonic possession. I came away from watching it feeling like The Rite really didn’t bring anything new to the concept of exorcism movies. I was disappointed that the majority of the plot dealt more with the crisis of faith that the character of Michael Kovak was having. As Kovak, Colin O’Donoghue gave what I consider to be a very uneven performance that kept me from fully connecting with the issues his character was facing. They never seemed to explain why it was so important to recruit him as a priest let alone an exorcist.
For me, The Rite suffered from too many artsy shots being passed off as storytelling and murky plot points to really be a good movie. But it is a decent movie and it raises some interesting philosophical questions regarding the existence of demonic possession.
It also had one thing that is always guaranteed to get my attention; it had Rutgar Hauer in it. Hauer’s quietly intense portrayal of funeral owner Istvan Kovak was unfortunately muddled by the aforementioned artsy shots that were passed off as storytelling. In my opinion, they should have gone with the alternate ending which is included in the bonus features.
Overall, The Rite was a decent movie to sit down and watch as long as you didn’t have your heart set on a good old fashioned horror movie or something with the intensity of The Exorcist.
The special features are, of course, only one the Blu-ray copy of the movie. Something I find highly annoying, as I didn’t like being forced to buy something new just to see all the cool extras. However the extras on The Rite are a bit on the boring side.
To learn more about the movie The Rite and find out how to own your own copy of the movie, check out the official Warner Brothers site for the movie.