“Diabolic” (2025) is a possession movie with some unexpected, fresh and provocative twists that buries the lead in the print promotions. The fundamentalism is not the garden variety Christian fundamentalism, but the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (“FLDS”), i.e. fundamentalist Mormons complete with a Warren Jeffs visual reference. If you are offended, move along, but if you are curious, stick around. Elise Decker (Elizabeth Cullen) left the church after a traumatic incident, but blackouts are disrupting her life. Her medical prescription is to get institutionalized or go to the people that got her in this mess to try some of their remedies. It is a horror movie so her choice is easy to guess. Malpractice, anyone?
“Diabolic” has a larger than usual cast. Cowriters Mike Harding and Daniel J. Phillips, who also directs, manage to take Ticia Madsen’s lived experience, give every character a surprise story arc and stick the landing. The cast is solid because even though it retroactively is obvious how the story will go, it is a surprise until Harding and Phillips are ready to show their hand. Cullen is pitch perfect as Elise. It opens with the traumatic incident that seemingly caused all of Elise’s mental issues then fast forwards ten years to see how she is holding up in the outside, secular world. When she returns to the scene of the crime, Elise has flashbacks and hallucinations, which give her clues regarding what happened to her.
Elise is sympathetic throughout the story as a character who never receives good caretaking though she needs it. This story resonated more than “The Witch” (2015) because her communities fail her and makes her vulnerable to possession. In this case, the supernatural was just waiting for them to inevitably slip up. Though the character who possesses Elise is not a demon, but the soul of a witch, Larue (Seraphine Harley), it works because the story allegedly rests on unfamiliar Mormon theology.
Larue is called a witch, but is she? She is not good. She kills. She is a cannibal, but you do not have to be a witch to murder and eat people though Hansel and Gretel would claim that it is in the job description. When alive, she acted like one of the many respectable women in the church. Similarly, so did Elise, who was hiding her own big secret when she was a young lady. Her first love is Clara (Luca Asta Sardelis), the bishop’s daughter, but being a lesbian was as bad as witchcraft in that community. Clara has zero memory of the ceremony conducted that made her lose her memory or what happened to Clara. “Diabolic” is determined to get to the bottom of those mysteries and many more.
It seems obvious that the creative team behind “Diabolic” are deliberately paralleling the outcasts because their former church members view their actions as equal sins. It does trigger the treacherous gay person trope already prevalent in movies, but because it is done in an empowering way and Madsen’s personal experience with the FDLS inspired this story, the filmmakers may have laid down enough groundwork that they cannot be accused of continuing harmful stereotypes. Instead, their intention is likely to subvert and reclaim the stigma of being called evil as empowering.
Mother and son, Alma (Genevieve Mooy) and Hyrum (Robin Goldsworthy), are the ones who accept the task of helping Elise with her possession problem. They prose dump a lot of the theology. Mooy and Goldsworthy do not make it feel monotonous, but organic as if they regularly execute these religious practices. Adam (John Kim), Elise’s husband, and Clara (Luca Asta Sardelis), Elise’s best friend, accompany Elise for support. They clash because Adam is less woo woo than Clara. In a long line of bad ideas, Adam decides that he will accompany Elise on the vision quest appropriated from Native Americans, which means they will both ingest drugs while Clara is the responsible adult. Despite Clara’s verbal enthusiasm towards alternative therapies, once the rubber hits the road, she is the smartest character who regrets all the life choices that led up to that moment and is visibly ready to leave. All these characters could have taken a back seat to the supernatural shenanigans, but they each have story arcs. Kim, Sardelis and the filmmakers took red shirt characters and made them more. Everything gets a smidge melodramatic, but it is not the accustomed beats of a possession horror.
Ninety-five minutes was too long because the proceedings drag for the last half hour as Elise finds more excuses not to leave. “Diabolic” is a bleak movie, and it takes its time unraveling the characters. It could have picked up the pace without mitigating the impact. If more time had been devoted to Larue instead of told through other characters’ eyes, maybe the length would have worked. The best part of “Witchboard” (2024) and “Tarot” (2024) was sympathizing with the witch’s decision to become evil, and “Diabolic” is better than all of them. Instead, the witch feels more like a villain from “The Conjuring Universe,” but if the filmmakers were suddenly placed in charge of that franchise, it would be a huge improvement.
Was “Diabolic” an indie or a fully funded production? It looked great except some night scenes were hard to decipher. All the exterior shots looked gorgeous and captured the beauty of Utah. The interior shots in the baptismal building are evocative. Just looking at the lighting indicates the mood. The dull, aged wood of the building turns warm and red with the right lighting. If it is ever revealed that they used different buildings, it would feel more believable than the way that production transforms one space.
If “Diabolic” does not work, it is because every character is stuck on stupid: the therapist for suggesting that she return to the people who caused her mental problems, her husband for taking hallucinogens with her, Hyriam for disregarding his mom’s warnings, Gwen for not leaving at the first sign of trouble, and Alma for thinking that she could make amends. It feels as if the cycle of bad decisions is a feature, not a flaw of the story. The ax to grind is against religious trauma, and it suggests that there is no escape from these cycles regardless of whether the characters grew up in the church or not. Maybe the real enemy is not only the FDLS, but heteronormativity and patriarchy though those points are less visceral than the fury directed at FDLS. Everyone becomes monsters under this system, and the witch is a disruptor and grand leveler. Systems do not matter when someone only likes to kill.
When people complain about movies like “Diabolic,” I want to know if they are also watching movies like “Whistle” (2025), “Return to Silent Hill” (2026), “The Haunted Forest” (2025) or “The Mortuary Assistant” (2026). The description and criticism sound as if it belongs to those movies, not this one. It is a horror movie with solid acting and visuals and a story that gets more right than wrong without any glaring deficiencies. The mythology is fresh and new though guaranteed to be offensive. If the momentum slags, it is fixable. It is Harding and Madsen’s first rodeo, and they did not fall off the horse. Congratulations for bringing something new to the possession genre, a molding, overused horror subgenre.
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Seriously, great mythologizing, filmmakers! Slow Eighties clap of appreciation. Take a controversial alleged Mormon spiritual ritual, baptism of the dead, that the public does not know about then use it as a vehicle for a dead woman to possess the living person being used as the proxy. Then add all these other rituals, and I cannot poke holes in it because I don’t know about Mormon closed practices. They could literally say anything. It is seamless. I’ve been so frustrated with stories lately not fully fleshing out the supernatural aspect of their stories, and I finally get something that I’m only vaguely familiar with, but enough that I could go along with it. To the detractors, this is not the usual ho hum possession tale. Don’t believe the haters! As someone unconcerned with good taste or appropriateness, usage may vary, but in terms of a movie, it is a strong foundation.
