Deliver Us from Evil (2006): You Must See This Movie

All posts in this blog are intended to highlight movies (either really good or really bad) that run the risk of being overlooked by the public. Great movies that are well known to the general public need not apply.

The following movie is in the Good category:

This is the first documentary to appear on this site. It’s probably fairly well known to people who are into documentaries but not as well known to the general public. The movie, about priests in the Catholic Church who molest children, focusses on alleged child molester Father Oliver O’Grady, whose warm Irish accent probably put a lot of families at ease, not realizing his true nature. His actions are compounded by the church simply relocating him nearby when complaints arise, thus giving him a new supply of potential victims while keeping him in fairly close proximity to his earlier alleged victims. The movie also includes interviews with his alleged victims as well as another priest, Father Tom Doyle, who tries to arrange a meeting between victims of molestations from priests and the Pope.

I use “alleged” in the loosest sense above because O’Grady is surprisingly candid in his interviews. He doesn’t come right out and admit to pedophilia but he comes very close to doing so. The movie delves into what it means from a Catholic perspective of what it means to be molested by a priest, beyond the obvious impacts that any child would feel. Doyle makes for some nice balance, demonstrating that there are some clergymen who, while loyal to the church, see the importance in fixing a serious problem.

While you’d expect anyway that hearing from survivors of priest molestation would put a human face to them, and the movie delivers on that part, O’Grady’s candidness means you get an amazing look into the mind of an alleged child molester as well. Without him this would likely still have been a very good movie, but O’Grady’s presence turns this documentary into something truly remarkable. You must see this movie.