Critics reviews

A woefully ineffective [film], turning what should be an easy piece of jolting propaganda into something so incompetent that even believers will struggle to care who wins. If the devil did exist then surely he’d have the power to destroy films as dull as this.

It’s a credit to Brown, Morgan, and Sadler that the story works at all. These actors maintain the illusion that "The Unholy" is a competent horror movie for far longer than it deserves. But in the end, there are just too many pieces missing to make this a coherent whole.

"The Unholy" is fairly standard religious horror... It has some excellent jump-scares, but overall there's something rote about the execution, bits that feel sketched-in as opposed to filled out... "The Unholy" is not designed to be deep, but since glimmers of depth are present, the lack of follow-up makes this a disappointing watch.

[The film] has an intriguing premise but cuts too many corners in its catechism... Not quite as ripe as "Conjuring" spinoff "The Nun" – and with considerably less ingenuity on the special effects.

Laboriously paced, the indulgent jolts and bloodless scares, neither deeply rooted nor artfully raised, float as lifelessly as a lily pad on a bog... While the bones of a potent religious horror film exist, “The Unholy” is a few Hail Marys short of a winning formula.

There’s the germ of a provocative idea in “The Unholy” — namely, what if you took a religious-visitation movie like “The Song of Bernadette” or “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” and turned it into a horror movie? Had the film bothered, or dared, to pursue that notion to the fullest, “The Unholy” might be something other than the standard-issue, priests-versus-demonic-spirits thriller that it is.

Fenn’s pro forma personal growth is, unfortunately, more of a concern to Spiliotopoulos than scaring the audience, or capitalizing on the luridly sacrilegious implications of his premise. After an atmospheric opening, "The Unholy" reveals itself to be profoundly timid and incurious.

“The Unholy” has a religious plot that actually works for it... We know that the movie can’t be all sweetness and light, but what matters is how solidly it believes in those things. That’s what gives its dark side a power. Good and evil face off in every horror movie, but this one is truly a holy war.

This is a middling effort stronger on production values than originality... For a more satisfying fix of New England pagan horror, I’m going back to Robert Eggers’ "The Witch."

[The film] gives us the usual weeping statues and a soundtrack heaving with crackles and whispers... Contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count [Jeffrey Dean] Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.

Despite its earnest warnings about a wolf draped in sheep’s clothing, the film never taps into the spooky power of the scripture’s most enduring scare tactics. This is the flimsiest of hokum, possessing all the gravity of a bible salesman hocking his wares outside the subway.