Stigmata: Review By moviegeek

Stigmata is about a woman who is mysteriously diagnosed with, well, stigmata. By definition, those are the flesh wounds on Christ's body at his crucifixion. This woman is an atheist which makes her possession all the more odd.

Patricia Arquette plays this poor soul and Gabriel Byrne (who tends to be in many, many supernatural thrillers) is a Catholic priest from Rome who investigates her case. As the movie lumbers along, she begins to not only be wounded, but she is also possessed from within.

Let's start with the good: I thought the statue of Mary crying blood was intriguing.

Okay, now that that is out of the way, we have the bad. There are two grounds for everything wrong in this movie. The cinematic grounds and the moral grounds.

In it's cinematic appeal, this is trash. The way this movie is shot and edited is near incomprehensible. There is 'stylistic' shots of faces and objects blurred into double vision that are not in the least bit interesting--instead they are nauseating. Then there is the plot. As ridiculous as it stands, it also contradicts itself in the most ridiculous of ways. For one, this woman loses countless amounts of blood, yet there is never any blood transplant received. She is simply bandaged up and sent home from the hospital. And then there is the romance between the priest and the woman. Yeaaa...

In it's MTV music video style, in its doc*mentary style end credits (as though someone would care about the 'facts'), in its ridiculously textbook acting, in its preposterously contradictory plot, in its obsession with unexplained religious symbolism, and in its attempts to frighten us with loud music and frantic camera moves, Stigmata is one piece of cinematic junk.

But there is a whole other reason why this movie is not just awful, it is obscene. This is a truly disgusting and repulsive work from Hollywood and I implore anyone reading NEVER watch this movie:

This movie takes hints from movies like The Exorcist and other 'internal possession' movies. In those movies, the characters are possessed by a demon of sorts who is controlling them. Well that's gross, of course, but Stigmata is something else entirely. Something worse.

What this movie claims is that there is something inside of this stigmatic woman--a spiritual force. But this force is not hell-sent, it is God-sent. It states that God is somehow using a dead priest's soul (shown at the beginning) and a woman's body to relate some lost biblical truth. That is blasphemous.

Regardless of religious aspirations or beliefs you may hold, this is New Age trash, completely unprecedented. Whatever values you may hold, Stigmata wants to make you believe that, in a place where priests believe in a God watching over them, He is simultaneously inflicting a woman with the most excruciating pain she could endure--simply to make a historically incoherent point.

Stigmata is horrendous. On both levels I am called to review (firstly, for myself and secondly, for the audience intended), I can tell you it is awful.