Consecration is the kind of movie that proves you can have:
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a moody Scottish island,
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a creepy convent,
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Jena Malone, Danny Huston, and a bucket of religious trauma…
…and still somehow end up with a film that feels like a very expensive church pamphlet written by someone who skimmed The Exorcist plot on Wikipedia.
On paper, this thing should slap. Supernatural murder mystery! Vatican meddling! Childhood powers! Isle of Skye vibes! Instead, it mostly shuffles around muttering “Heretic… but make it vague” while you check your watch and wonder how a film about culty nuns still manages to be this sleepy.
Plot? Kind Of! Vibes? Also Kind Of.
Our protagonist is Dr. Grace Fario (Jena Malone), an English woman whose life goes straight to hell—metaphorically, allegedly—after she learns her priest brother Michael has died under mysterious circumstances at a convent on the Isle of Skye.
The convent claims it was a suicide. The authorities suspect foul play. Grace suspects… honestly, whatever the script needs her to suspect at any given moment.
She journeys to the convent to:
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Investigate her brother’s death
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Confront her forgotten past
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Stare at stone walls and look confused
As she digs deeper, we find out:
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Grace had creepy powers as a child.
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She has blocked out most of her past.
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The convent is hiding secrets (you don’t say).
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Everyone might be lying about everything, including God, logic, and basic storytelling structure.
We also get a murder investigation, some scattered flashbacks, religious visions, and nuns who alternate between sinister, devout, and “NPC with one line of dialogue.”
It’s all supposed to build toward a twisty, reality-bending revelation about faith, power, and hypocrisy. In practice, it plays like a three-part miniseries that got accidentally edited down to 90 minutes by someone who cut every scene labeled “explains what the hell is going on.”
Jena Malone Deserves Financial Compensation
Jena Malone is doing The Work™ here. As Grace, she spends most of the film:
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Looking haunted
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Demanding answers
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Experiencing visions
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Being gaslit by everyone in a habit
And she’s good. She sells trauma, anger, and confusion with conviction. You absolutely believe she is a woman teetering between grief and something much more unhinged.
The problem is that the script keeps feeding her half-baked revelations like, “You had powers as a child but forgot your entire backstory, anyway moving on, here’s another slow scene of walking.” Grace rarely feels like she’s driving the story. She’s more like a somber Roomba bumping into clues in a stone corridor.
Danny Huston as Father Romero does his usual “mysterious, vaguely menacing clergy guy” routine. He’s fine, but the role is written like someone taped together every stern priest archetype from the last 30 years and forgot to add a personality. He appears, says something ominous about faith, then disappears to let the fog do the rest.
Janet Suzman as Mother Superior at least looks like she could have someone excommunicated with a single glare. Unfortunately, the movie never really lets her be as terrifying or as layered as she could be. She’s half “holy tyrant,” half “exposition device,” and neither half gets enough screentime to become truly compelling.
Everyone else—nuns, cops, doctors—might as well be walking set dressing. They’re functional. They stand in halls and say things like “You shouldn’t be here” or “Some things are better left in God’s hands,” which is movie-speak for “we didn’t actually write you a character arc.”
Religious Horror Without the Horror (or the Religion)
For a movie that’s supposedly about faith, sin, and sacred corruption, Consecration is weirdly uninterested in digging into any of that beyond surface-level iconography.
We’ve got:
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Crosses
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Confessionals
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Vows of silence
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People saying “blasphemy” a lot
But thematically? It’s all fog and no depth.
Is Grace wrestling with the idea of God? Kind of, but mostly she just snaps “I don’t believe in that” and then moves on to the next hallucination.
Is the Church hiding something monstrous? Yes, in the same way horror movies always say “the institution is bad” and then forget to specify what it actually believes beyond “don’t ask questions.”
The film flirts with cool ideas—like Grace’s powers possibly being divine, demonic, or something in between—but then runs away before things get too complicated. It’s scared of choosing a lane. Is this a story about:
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A woman reclaiming her past?
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A conspiracy in the Church?
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A supernatural destiny?
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A true-crime murder case?
Answer: “Yes, but also no, and please don’t think about it too hard.”
Horror Set Pieces: Death by Aesthetic
You can tell they shot this on the Isle of Skye because the movie will not shut up about it visually. Wide shots of cliffs. The convent perched dramatically on a crag. Moody gray skies. Narrow stone corridors. The cinematography is genuinely beautiful.
Unfortunately, atmosphere ≠ terror.
We get a lot of slow walks through gloomy corridors, visions sprinkled in like seasoning, and the occasional abrupt shock that feels less like “earned scare” and more like “oops, we haven’t startled you in fifteen minutes, here’s a loud thing.”
The supernatural elements are strangely timid:
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Ghosts appear, stare, vanish.
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Grace has visions that are edited as if the movie is allergic to sustained tension.
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There are hints of divine or demonic power, but never anything that tips into full, satisfying madness.
It’s like ordering an exorcism and getting a strongly worded letter from your priest instead.
The Twist: Ah Yes, Confusion, My Old Friend
This is not a spoiler review, but let’s just say the movie does that thing where:
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It withholds information for 80 minutes.
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Then panic-dumps a pile of “shocking truths” about Grace’s past, her family, and her powers.
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Then expects you to feel emotionally devastated instead of mildly bewildered.
You can see what they wanted: a climactic reveal that reframes the whole story and makes you go, “Ohhhhh, that’s why everyone was acting so weird.”
What you actually get is more like: “Okay, but why didn’t you just tell me any of this an hour ago so I could care about it?”
Even the murder investigation thread—Michael’s death, his alleged crimes, what really happened—gets swallowed up by the metaphysical shrug of it all. We’re left with something that’s technically resolved but not particularly satisfying.
Wasted Potential: The Movie
The most frustrating thing about Consecration is how much it could have worked.
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A grief-stricken, rational protagonist with latent powers? Great.
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A convent full of secrets on a lonely Scottish island? Great.
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A dead brother, a murder investigation, and a Church that might be more scared of Grace than she is of it? Great.
All the ingredients are there. Then someone apparently set the oven to “moody” instead of “engaging,” and we ended up with a gorgeous but undercooked casserole of half-explored ideas.
It’s not aggressively bad. It’s competently made, occasionally eerie, sometimes interesting. But horror that’s “fine” is almost more disappointing than horror that’s outright terrible, because you can see the better movie trapped inside this one, banging on the walls, whispering, “Let me out.”
Much like Grace’s childhood memories, I’m sure.
Final Verdict: Needs More Consecration, Less Confusion
Consecration wants to be a brooding meditation on faith, guilt, and power wrapped in a supernatural thriller. What it mostly ends up being is 90 minutes of watching Jena Malone do her absolute best while the movie quietly refuses to commit to being scary, smart, or coherent.
If you love:
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Gloomy convent visuals
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Vague religious mutterings
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And horror that feels like a slow, damp sermon delivered by a very tired priest
…you might vibe with it.
Otherwise, you’re probably better off rewatching The Nun and yelling at it, or just staring at a picture of the Isle of Skye while reading a Wikipedia article on heresy. At least then you’ll get atmosphere and clarity.
