A ROSE FOR EMILY Saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose in Evanston on Friday night.

Emily Rose is a nice, studious, young woman from a small, rural town in...well...somewhere, the film didn't specify. Anway, Emily has been offered a scholarship to attend a similarly vague "university." Almost immediately after Emily starts college, something goes wrong. She begins to hallucinate and her body contorts into strange positions. She seeks help from psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, but nothing seems to work. Eventually, she returns home and her family asks their priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson), for help. Father Moore decides to perform an exorcism on Emily, during which, she dies.

The preceding is described in flashback during the trial of Father Moore for negligent homicide for his involvement in Emily's death. Emily Rose is actually two movies in one, one half supernatural horror, the other, courtroom drama. Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), a big-time, criminal defense lawyer, is hired for Father Moore's defense. She's a talented attorney, but appears troubled by her profession, particularly her role in defending a man acquitted of murder charges. She and Father Moore are up against Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), the public prosecutor whom we are informed is a devout Chrsitian. Soon after Bruner takes up Moore's case, strange things begin happening in her own life...

I liked Emily Rose, but left the theater feeling a bit unsatisfied. The flashbacks to Emily's predicament are the better part of the film. Jennifer Carpenter plays Emily and, with her smooth, blank, face and big, spacey eyes, there's something otherwordly about her from the beginning. She does a fantastic job acting out Emily's possession/psychosis. She's very physical and kinetic, her long limbs flailing everywhere, seemingly without concern for her own safety. These scenes have a deatched, clinical air about them that makes them all the more unsettling.

The courtroom scenes left me wanting more. They're not bad, but they're not that interesting either. The film attempts to set up the trial as a serious examination of the differences between science and faith, but while it's very even-handed, it goes nowhere, as the frequent flashbacks kill momentum. The film also doesn't deliver on several heavy-handed hints that, due to her involvement in the case, terrible things will happen to Linney's character. Some might find this low-key approach in a supernatural/horror film to be refreshing, but I thought it was something of a cop-out. I didn't think the makers of Emily Rose were any more mature for their unwillingness or failure to follow through on plot threads that they took the time to bring to our attention.  ¶ 7:21 AM