Stigmata

This supernatural thriller from 1999 received bad reviews at the time despite doing well at the box office and this reviewer fails to see why it ever did well at the box office to begin with! Basically it is a load of old cobblers in which a hip-living atheist suddenly experiences the symptoms of stigmata and well, were it not for the fact that said atheist suddenly goes down the Linda Blair/Exorcist route, then Stigmata may have turned into a different beast altogether… possibly a more believable one at that!

Kicking off in a Brazilian village, a certain Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne), who can also add ‘former scientist’ to this holy resume, examines the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe who began to cry tears of blood at the funeral of another Holy Father. Was the blood group of this Stigmata event actually established? The truth it out there, and while Father Kiernan investigates, a poor boy steals the rosary from the Father’s hand and later sells it to an American woman who happens to live in the area. The woman then sends the crucifix to her daughter (who happens to live in Pittsburgh) as a gift and a souvenir. Enter Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette), a free-spirited hairstylist who also happens to be a devoted atheist. Well! I don’t know about you dear readers, but if I were a devoted atheist I wouldn’t touch a rosary with a barge pole, however, in this convoluted plot that’s precisely what Frankie does (obviously mistaking it for some pseudo-gothic jewelry). Whaddya know, soon enough she starts bleeding left, right and center and hey, it’s not even her time of the month as becomes apparent. Poor cow! Yes, the truth is out there and as the five wounds of stigmata begin to show one after another the local doctors are left clueless. A local priest tapes the strange phenomenon and sends the tapes to the Vatican who promptly dispatches Father Kiernan to investigate yet again (at that rate he may be better off working for the FBI). Unfortunately a dodgy Cardinal by the name of Daniel Housman (Jonathan Pryce) soon strives to make the lives of Frankie and Father Kiernan rather unpleasant indeed.

As the unholy saga continues and the plot becomes ever more absurd, Frankie seems possessed by the demons of hell and rambling aggressive sounding sentences in ancient Aramaic while her face seems to undergo horrendous muscle spasms and with her eyes turning dayglo yellow. Hells bells begin to ring even louder when the reason for Cardinal Housman’s unpleasant meddling is revealed: it all has to do with an apparently stolen gospel document whose existence had been denied by the church but which has now been found in… Pittsburgh! And a highly controversial gospel it is, because it contains words by none other than Jesus himself, saying that the Kingdom of God is in all of us and not just exclusively for the Holy Church. Does this actually imply that we don't have to go to church anymore to pray, and that a lot of priests could be made redundant? And that churches could be turned into arts- and leisure centers? No wonder Cardinal Housman and Co. seem a little uneasy and are adamant the document should be kept a secret (not that anyone could accuse the Church of corruption)! It is almost as bad China denying the existence of Fu-Manchu (only kidding). Father Kiernan, however, is a more honest man but will he succeed in the battle against corruption and evil? Indeed, was this film supposed to invoke a lot of controversy? One can only imagine that, like a few other films delving into religious documents that have recently come to light and 'threaten' to shake the foundations of the all powerful Roman Catholic church, STIGMATA will have its supporters and detractors.

Gabriel Byrne adds some gravitas to his part, which is by and large wasted due to an ultimately mediocre script. Patricia Arquette has the unthankful task of performing a lot of hysteric screaming and frantically running about places like a frightened rabbit, while the overblown special effects do nothing to emphasize the film’s ‘serious message’. A real shame and a real wasted opportunity!