Prey for the Devil is the kind of movie that proves possession doesn’t just happen to people—it can also happen to screenplays. At some point, what might’ve been an interesting idea about trauma, faith, and exorcism seems to have been taken over by a demon called “Studio Notes,” and the result is a glossy, hollow church brochure with jump scares.
On paper, it sounds promising: a nun training as an exorcist during a worldwide surge in demonic possessions, facing a demon that may be tied to her own traumatic past. In practice, it plays like a lesser entry in The Conjuring Cinematic Universe that wandered in without an invite, armed only with clichés and a smoke machine.
The Vatican’s Least Effective HR Training Video
The film opens with a global rise in demonic possessions, so the Catholic Church responds by… reopening exorcism schools. Not reexamining doctrine, not rooting out corruption, not maybe hiring more therapists—just doubling down on holy water and Latin. It’s Hogwarts for haunted people, except somehow less fun and with worse structural integrity.
The “school” is a weird hybrid of seminary, hospital, and paranormal trade school. Priests-in-training attend lectures about demons like they’re prepping for a midterm, and then wander into what’s essentially a haunted psych ward where possessed patients growl, contort, and occasionally stop long enough to provide exposition.
There’s a version of this premise that could be genuinely fascinating: treat exorcism training like a specialized medical residency, with ethical dilemmas, institutional politics, and the weight of dealing with suicidal, mentally ill, or traumatized people. Instead, Prey for the Devil uses the school mostly as a backdrop for Ann to look soulful in a habit while the soundtrack screams, “BE SCARED NOW.”
Sister Ann vs. The Script
Jacqueline Byers, as Sister Ann, is doing her best to give the movie a soul. She plays Ann as earnest, wounded, and empathetic—a woman shaped by her mother’s torment and drawn to help others who might be suffering the same way. You can see the outline of a compelling character: a survivor of familial abuse and mental illness, convinced that something darker was lurking behind it, now trying to fight that darkness for other people.
Unfortunately, the film refuses to trust her or the audience with complexity. Instead, it keeps hammering home That One Trauma like a demonic PowerPoint. The possession stuff isn’t creepy so much as repetitive: whispers, contortions, glowing eyes, and the occasional levitation, all stitched together like a greatest-hits reel of exorcism imagery you’ve seen in better films.
Ann being a nun-in-exorcist-training could have been a sharp divergence from the usual “grizzled male priest with a tragic backstory.” Instead, the movie almost immediately undercuts its own mild daring. Yes, she’s not supposed to perform exorcisms because she’s a woman, but conveniently, Father Quinn recognizes her “special gifts” and starts training her anyway. Cue the predictable sexism-lite conflict: some priests snicker, some superiors disapprove, and the movie congratulates itself for feminism because a nun gets to hold a rosary with conviction while men look skeptical.
It’s like the film wants brownie points for daring to let a woman fight a demon in public, but refuses to explore what that actually means beyond, “She cares more about feelings than the men do.”
Demons, but Make It Mild
Let’s talk about the horror, or rather, the lack thereof. Prey for the Devil rarely builds genuine dread. Instead, it operates on the modern studio-horror model: dim corridor, slow walk, loud noise, face in camera, repeat. There are a couple of effective images—an elderly possessed man forcing Ann into an unwanted dance, for example—but they’re surrounded by so many generic scare beats that they lose impact.
The demon itself has the personality of a customer service chatbot programmed by someone who skimmed The Exorcist. It taunts, it mocks, it conveniently reveals plot information, but it never feels like a true, terrifying intelligence. It’s less “ancient evil” and more “annoying roommate from hell.”
The set pieces—especially around young Natalie—feel like they were assembled from a checklist:
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Child: ✔
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Creepy drawings: ✔
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Distorted voice: ✔
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Climbing walls / contorting: ✔
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Screaming priest: ✔
There’s no sense of escalation beyond “louder and more obvious.” By the time Ann is throwing herself into a pool of holy water, you’re less scared than mildly impressed no one slipped and sued.
Trauma, Now With Extra Holy Water
The film tries very hard to ground its supernatural story in psychological trauma. Ann’s relationship with her mentally unstable, presumably possessed mother is the emotional core of her vocation. She recognizes that some of the “cases” in the institution are just untreated mental illness. There’s even a psychologist character, Dr. Peters (Virginia Madsen), to provide the obligatory “maybe it’s not a demon” argument.
This could have been an intriguing tug-of-war: faith versus psychology, spiritual warfare versus ethical treatment. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t really engage with it. It just flirts with nuance, winks, and then runs back to its comfort zone: “Yes, yes, mental illness is real, but in this case it’s definitely a demon, look, the eyes turned black again.”
Then they bolt on the big melodramatic twist: Natalie—the main possessed child—is Ann’s biological daughter, whom she gave up for adoption as a pregnant teenager. The demon haunting Ann’s mother, haunting Ann, and now haunting Natalie is apparently on a multi-generational revenge tour. Not because of some ancient curse, but because… abandonment issues?
That’s not emotionally resonant so much as outright tasteless. The film essentially suggests that the pain of adoption and separation turned a child into demon bait, and that their reunion must happen in the middle of a CGI-assisted exorcism. It’s like the writers asked, “How can we make this more dramatic?” and the answer was, “Throw in a Lifetime movie twist and hope no one asks follow-up questions.”
Vatican Fellowship, Sponsored by Sequel Bait
After surviving possession, freeing her daughter, and basically winning the Exorcism Olympics, Ann is rewarded with a fellowship to the Vatican. It’s such an absurd tonal pivot it almost plays like unintentional satire. “You survived generational demonic targeting and nearly died in a sanctified swimming pool—congratulations, here’s a study abroad program!”
Then, of course, the final sequence reveals that the evil is not done. The creepy, previously possessed old man appears as her cab driver, a sinister woman stares at her dramatically from the street, and the movie teases us with the possibility of a broader supernatural conspiracy. Instead of feeling ominous, it feels like a studio-mandated nudge: “We could franchise this, right? Right?”
Given the critical reception, the scariest thing about this ending is the possibility executives actually had a whiteboard with “Prey for the Devil 2?” written on it for at least a week.
Wasted Cast, Wasted Opportunity
The supporting actors—Colin Salmon as Father Quinn, Christian Navarro as Father Dante, Virginia Madsen as Dr. Peters, Ben Cross as the Cardinal—bring more gravitas than the material deserves. They’re capable of nuance, but the script gives them cardboard archetypes to inhabit: Wise Mentor, Tragic Student, Sceptical Doctor, Stern Church Authority.
Everyone involved seems to be acting in a different, better movie than the one we’re watching. One where the exorcism school actually explores institutional complicity, where the line between spiritual and psychological care is blurry and fraught, where Ann’s gender isn’t just window dressing for “Look, progress!” but truly shapes how she navigates the church.
Instead, any interesting idea the film raises is immediately abandoned in favor of another predictable scare or a sentimental speech about faith and perseverance.
Final Verdict: Possessed by Pure Mediocrity
Prey for the Devil isn’t offensively bad; it’s just aggressively mediocre in almost every way that counts. It’s a paint-by-numbers exorcism movie that thinks a female protagonist and a few therapy references make it fresh, while it still clings to the most tired genre tropes like a rosary in a thunderstorm.
If you’re brand new to possession films and extremely generous, you might find it passably entertaining. But if you’ve seen even a handful of exorcism stories—from The Exorcist to The Last Exorcism to any random streaming knockoff—you’ve seen everything this movie has to offer, usually done with more tension, more thought, and more personality.
In the end, the only real “prey” here is the audience’s time and patience. The devil, mercifully, has better things to do.
