Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Barely four hours after watching ‘Stigmata‘, I had already forgotten its name. ‘Praise the lord’ for giving some of us the kind of brain that quickly discards useless information. But I had to head back to Netflix, scroll through the horror section, and rediscover it the same way we did during a family movie night.
Directed by Rupert Wainwright, ‘Stigmata‘ stars Patricia Arquette as Frankie Paige, a young hairdresser who begins to suffer violent, unexplained bleeding wounds, quickly drawing the attention of the Church. The Vatican dispatches Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne) to determine whether Frankie is a fraud, or a genuine case of stigmata, a phenomenon in which believers develop wounds mirroring those suffered by Jesus during the crucifixion.
At 1 hour and 43 minutes, ‘Stigmata‘ plays like a horror music video stretched far past an acceptable length, confused between aspiring to be a moody, sacrilegious anthem about Jesus and a garish pop number about a woman whose wardrobe is louder than the film’s ideas. Seriously, supernatural elements might be making Frankie bleed in this film, but the ghastly cinematography might make your eyes bleed.
Frankly, the premise is interesting, an openly atheist Frankie, framed early on as a sinner, is forced to endure the wounds of Jesus, an irony that could’ve made for sharp religious horror. Instead, the film fumbles the execution so badly that the result is chaotic, grating, and often unintentionally funny. The awkward, unnecessary romantic tension between the priest and Frankie only pushes ‘Stigmata’ further off the rails.
The constant jumpy transitions and try-hard camera angles quickly become grating, and no one on screen delivers a performance worth remembering. I briefly considered cutting the film some slack, since it is from 1999, but then one realizes ‘The Mummy‘ came out the same year and boasted such great visual effects for the time. In-fact, ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999), was made on a shoestring budget of roughly $60,000, and packed more dread than ‘Stigmata‘, which reportedly cost around $28 million.
Some of the violent scenes will creep viewers out, but overall, this is a pretty underwhelming production. So unless you’ve genuinely run out of horror options, or are looking for something you can half-watch while doing chores, ‘Stigmata‘ isn’t really worth anybody’s time.
Rating: 3 on 10. Stigmata is on Netflix.
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