The Seventh Day is basically what every review has called: Training Day meets The Exorcist. Guy Pearce plays a the grizzled older exorcist, this rookie priest has some twists and turns, and there are some exorcisms.
It’s not quite the train wreck you would imagine it to be. The film starts off relatively OK—as you may imagine, it then gets sillier and sillier as it plods along through its 87 minutes. It’s just really not a very good film. That’s a shame because as I always say, Guy Pierce is one of the greatest actors on the planet. This is an actor who did back to back The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and L.A. Confidential—that’s what you call range. He has this incredible ability as an actor to do anything, but sadly in the last few years he has been relegated to a lot of VOD stuff like Disturbing the Peace or as I call it “Disturbing the Pearce”, some television work like the “dark” version of A Christmas Carol that got mixed reviews, and the main villain in Bloodshot. Hopefully his role in Mare of Easttown, a new HBO show, will give him some sort of capital to have a bit of a comeback, because it’s been awhile since he’s done anything truly memorable.
Pierce is fine in The Seventh Day, and he was actually one of the film’s executive producers. Keith Davis, who everyone remembers from John Carpenter’s movies , has a very small part at the start, and Stephen Lane plays the archbishop. It seems like the kind of film that probably read well, but they didn’t have any money to do it properly. The result is a film that runs out of steam pretty quick.
It seems like the director’s first film did OK on the festival circuit, and I’m sure this was also done with good intentions—but the money people just wanted something quick with Pierce in it. You don’t end up caring about any of the characters. As for all the exorcist stuff, why not just watch The Exorcist, go ahead and put it on a double bill with Training Day. Visually it’s a bit better than some of the VOD stuff where there’s some name actor to sell it, like those endless string of Nicolas Cage films but at least with those there is always the possibility of a crazy gem with those and I’m not even talking Color Out of Space or Mandy (which is a masterpiece) but something like Between Worlds. The cinematographer also shot Hotel Mumbai few years ago which is a real movie so that might explain why it looks at least competently filmed .
There are no extras on the disc.
★★
Ian Schultz
psychotroniccinema.com 