PROFANITY AND GRACE: The unexpected kinship of ANORA and THE EXORCIST

by John Larkin

At first glance, ANORA and THE EXORCIST would seem to have almost nothing to do with each other.

One is Sean Baker’s volatile, funny and bruising portrait of a young sex worker pulled into the fantasy of wealth, marriage, escape and emotional rescue. The other is William Friedkin’s landmark horror film about a child’s possession, a mother’s desperation and two priests confronting evil in its most grotesque and inexplicable form. One moves through strip clubs, mansions, nightclubs and the back rooms of modern transactional intimacy. The other moves through a Georgetown bedroom transformed into a chamber of spiritual terror.

Yet both films understand something essential about the movies: sometimes the most serious human stories arrive disguised as spectacle.

ANORA gives the audience an immediate surface charge. The film is physical, sexual, loud, flirtatious, comic and chaotic. Its early pleasures are built around the energy of bodies, money, fantasy, performance and the dream of being chosen. Ani (Mikey Madison) appears to occupy a world where everything is immediate: desire, cash, movement, escape and attention. The film knows that the audience is watching this world with a certain fascination. There is a voyeuristic pull to it. We are drawn into its glamour and vulgarity before we fully understand the cost.

THE EXORCIST does something similar through horror. Its most famous images are outrageous, shocking and unforgettable: the crucifix scene, the vomiting, the obscenities, the desecration of a child’s body, the violation of innocence and the sense that something private and sacred has been ripped open for public view. The film became a cultural event partly because audiences came to see what they had heard whispered about. It offered the forbidden. It promised an experience that felt dangerous.

That is the unexpected bond between the two films. They both draw upon primal moviegoing attractions. ANORA uses sex, youth, money, comedy and romantic fantasy. THE EXORCIST uses shock, disgust, fear, blasphemy and bodily horror. Both know exactly what the audience has come to see.

The comparison becomes even stronger at the level of form. Baker and Friedkin ground their sensational material in a patient, almost documentary attention to procedure. ANORA observes work, payment, negotiation, transportation, waiting and the exhausting logistics of dismantling a fantasy. THE EXORCIST observes medical testing, psychiatric consultation, police investigation and religious ritual. In both films, realism gives the spectacle its weight.

The outrageous becomes frightening or painful because the world surrounding it feels completely tangible.But neither film stops there.

The deeper power of ANORA is not the sex. It is the loneliness underneath the sex. It is the ache of someone who has learned to survive by performing desire, suddenly allowing herself to believe that the performance might become real. Ani’s tragedy is not simply that she is used. It is that, for a brief period, she lets herself imagine that she has escaped being used. The film slowly strips away the fantasy until what remains is not eroticism or comedy, but a devastating human question: what happens to a person when the dream of being loved turns out to be another transaction?

That is why ANORA lingers. Beneath its chaos is an almost old fashioned sadness. It is about the hunger to be seen as more than a body, more than a service, more than a good time and more than someone who can be bought and discarded. Its emotional force comes from the gradual collapse of performance. The movie begins in a world of noise and motion, but its meaning gathers in the silence after the fantasy dies.

The final scene brings the film’s separation of sex and intimacy into devastating focus. Ani attempts to respond to Igor through the form of exchange she understands, turning his kindness into another sexual transaction. But when he responds with tenderness rather than simply accepting the transaction, the performance becomes unsustainable. Her anger and grief suggest that genuine intimacy may be more frightening than sex because it asks her to appear without the protection of a role. For the first time, her body is no longer functioning as performance, service or fantasy. It becomes the place where her pain can finally emerge.

THE EXORCIST also moves beyond its shocks. The horror is not finally about the spinning head, the vomit or the obscenity. Those elements are the surface eruptions of something deeper: the mystery of evil, the fragility of innocence and the terror of a universe in which rational explanations fail. Friedkin’s film is not powerful merely because it frightens us. It is powerful because it forces belief and doubt into the same room.

At its center is a mother who cannot save her daughter through science, medicine, wealth or willpower. Around her are doctors and priests who are themselves limited, wounded, uncertain and human. The procedures through which Regan is examined become increasingly invasive, but none of them can reach the person who appears to be disappearing inside her own body. The failure is not necessarily one of intelligence or concern. It is a failure of every available system to explain the full reality of her suffering.

Father Karras is not a superhero of faith. He is a man in spiritual crisis. He is consumed by guilt over the death of his mother and tormented by the possibility that he no longer believes in the vocation that has defined his life. That is what gives the ending its force. His sacrifice is not the inevitable action of a spiritually invulnerable hero. It is the final choice of a frightened and doubtful man who finds meaning through an act of love.

When Karras invites the demon into his own body and then gives himself over to death in order to save Regan, the spectacle of possession gives way to sacrifice. The film’s decisive act is not one of evil triumphing, but of one person accepting another’s suffering as his own. Regan is restored because Karras is willing to become the vessel in her place.

That is where ANORA and THE EXORCIST meet in a strange and unlikely place. Both place the body at the center of their spectacle. Both attract attention through transgression. Both risk being remembered only for their most provocative images. But their real subjects are concealed underneath what the audience initially comes to see.

The experiences of Ani and Regan are not equivalent. Ani is an adult whose sexuality is connected to work, performance, economic survival and the limited forms of agency available to her. Regan is a child whose body and identity are violently commandeered. The connection lies not in equating their experiences, but in the position occupied by the audience. Each film initially directs our attention toward a body made into spectacle, then demands that we recognize the suffering person whom the spectacle has threatened to obscure.

ANORA is not finally about sex. It is about loneliness, class, fantasy and the desperate need for genuine human connection.

THE EXORCIST is not finally about shock. It is about faith, evil, doubt and the possibility that goodness survives through sacrifice.

The films ultimately part company in what they offer as salvation. THE EXORCIST ends with sacrificial love. Karras gives his life and the child is restored. ANORA offers no comparable miracle. Ani does not escape her circumstances, receive justice or emerge with a comforting romantic certainty. Its final scene offers something smaller and more ambiguous: the possibility of being held without being purchased.

One film locates grace in an act of religious sacrifice. The other finds a more uncertain form of grace in the moment when performance collapses and genuine emotion can no longer be suppressed.

Both films understand that cinema often reaches the soul through the body first. We are pulled in by what is sensational, forbidden, funny, frightening or arousing. Then, almost before we realize it, the film has moved us somewhere more serious. The surface pleasure becomes a doorway. The spectacle becomes a trapdoor into meaning.

Neither film is moralistic, but both possess a profound moral seriousness. They ask what happens when a human being is reduced to a body, a commodity, a diagnosis or a vessel. More importantly, they ask whether an act of genuine care can restore the person whom everyone else has failed to see.

ANORA can be sold as a wild, profane and sexual Cinderella story gone wrong. THE EXORCIST can be sold as the scariest movie ever made. Those descriptions explain why audiences arrive. They do not explain why the films remain.

They remain because both are ultimately films about exposure. Not simply the exposure of bodies, obscenity, sexuality or horror, but the exposure of the human condition once every illusion has been stripped away. In the end, what is revealed is not perversity. It is fear and love.