[Panic Fest 2021 Review] The Old Ways Offers a New Take on the Possession Film

In recent years, exorcism films have broken from the Catholic tradition to recreate or reassess the possession subgenre from different religions and idealogies. From the South Korean epic The Wailing to the Jewish The Vigil, it’s refreshing to see different takes and how different cultures handle demonic possession. Into this subgenre, director Christopher Alender, working from a script by Marcos Gabriel, takes The Old Ways to Veracruz and uses it to explore how traditions vanish under secularization and urbanization. 

A brief cold open sets the tone with a dying woman (Michelle Jubilee Gonzalez) pleading with her young daughter that everything will be okay before transforming into a monstrous visage and attacking her. It immediately establishes that while the film will be about exorcisms and possession, it has a different lens, as the priest has been replaced by an older woman using the titular old ways. The narrative then jumps decades later and reintroduces us to that little girl, now a grown woman named Cristina (Brigitte Kali Canales). After her mother’s death, Cristina was raised in America. Now an investigative reporter, she has returned to her birth place to explore Veracruz’s local customs and traditions, which led her to a mysterious set of ruins the locals call La Boca.

She’s introduced, though, tied to a chair with a burlap sack over her head. She’s in a makeshift prison and an older man named Javi (Sal Lopez) walks around the small room, lighting candles and prepares for some sort of ritual. Cristina pleads with him that she’s American and to talk to her cousin Miranda (Andrea Cortés) to verify the story. He ignores her and then Luz (Julia Vera), a bruja, one eye milky blind, the other sharp and black, enters the room. Her face is painted white with red streaks across her eyes and down her temple. After examining Cristina, she says simply, “She has it” and then Javi forces a giant jug of goat milk down her throat. 

The next day, Miranda does show up and looks at her cousin with concern and a touch of pity. She tells Cristina she warned her not to go to La Boca and when Cristina implores her to tell them she’s no threat, Miranda replies, “They don’t believe they can let you go.” They believe she brought something back with her from La Boca; something ancient and undeniably evil. Various flashbacks suggest that is, in fact true, as we see the cavernous ruins, hear ominous chuckles and see something lurking in the darkness.

Cristina becomes an unwitting participant for Luz’s specific way of exorcism so she can discover what has latched itself to Cristina…and ultimately destroy it before it brings ruin to everyone.

The Old Ways is a fairly straightforward possession film, but one that trades “The power of Christ compels you!” and holy water for Bruja mysticism. Luz is a Bruja, potentially one of the last of her kind, the film posits, and with her elderly age comes the realization that the teachings that keep demons at bay might, too, be dying. Marcos Gabriel’s script obliquely suggests that as people like Cristina leave Mexico for urban areas and secularism that the United States potentially provides, they are also leaving behind a rich culture. And that without a young population to continue those traditions, they will eventually die out with the older generation. The narrative doesn’t harp on this issue, but rather subtly utilizes Cristina as a way of exploring it.

After her mother’s death, Cristina was raised in the United States and she left her family behind. Her cousin harbors obvious resentment towards her and throws it back in her face by telling her she’s been gone twenty years and never once reconnected with her roots until this job. It’s also quickly revealed that Cristina is a heroin addict and this exorcism feels just as much of a journey of withdrawal and defeating her addiction as it is fighting supernatural forces. For awhile, The Old Ways does a decent job of contrasting her withdrawals to the horrific images and hallucinations Cristina sees. It stages nightmares and jolts of horror as potential symptoms of withdrawals.

A couple truly unsettling moments of tension and gore, from glimpses of something monstrous hiding in the dark recesses of the cell and brief shots of gross things getting pulled, writhing and blood-clotted, from her stomach goose the tension. The horror elements, in general, work exceedingly well, slowly ratcheting the tension during each sequence. All of these moments come from Cristina’s hazy and fearful perspective in an attempt to establish that this could all be within her mind as she works the drugs out of her body.

But it’s obvious from the opening shot that eventually it’ll be impossible to hide from the fact that this is a supernatural exorcism film…from a Bruja angle. It’s an intriguing contrast, though, because it puts the power squarely in the hands of a Latina who, instead of channeling some power from Christ, uses her own strength to do battle with the demonic forces. As the exorcism progresses, Director of Photography Adam Lee frames the horror in frightening ways. The Old Ways is set mostly in a single location and, particularly, in a cell. And yet Lee is able to utilize the limited space to create fantastic moments of both terror and gore. The Old Ways also just looks expensive, with lush cinematography and fantastic production design. Composer Ben Lovett (The Ritual, The Wind, Synchronicity) adds to the terror with a smart score that underlines the culture while providing tension.

The Old Ways ticks all the possession/exorcism boxes but does so with a strong sense of style and production design on par with Hollywood-produced shockers. And while it ultimately apes a lot of the familiar beats fans have come to expect, it does so with panache and a refreshingly different perspective.