Stigmata

More terrifying than believing there is no God, reflects Stigmata's Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette) after she's woken up in the ER with spike wounds through her wrist and later been flogged by invisible assailants in the subway, is believing there is. The film itself is almost terrifying when it delves into the nature of divinity, but ultimately Jesus comes out looking like a talk-show guest plugging a new-age self-help book. Meanwhile director Rupert Wainwright makes Frankie's plight -- simple Pittsburgh hairstylist ("Who's Francis of Assissi?") miraculously afflicted by the wounds of Christ and caught up in a murky Vatican conspiracy -- seem like an exhausting music video combining S&M, chant, and Björk related with the stylistic excesses of David Fincher's Seven and the theological hokum of John Boorman's Exorcist II. Gabriel Byrne plays the thankless role of the voice of reason as Father Andrew Kiernan, a Vatican specialist in debunking miracles who meets his match in more ways than one in Arquette's unwilling stigmatic. Unfortunately, he doesn't uncover the fraudulence behind this picture. Stigmata is too dimwitted and confused to be blasphemous -- the only god it worships is bad taste.

-- Peter Keough