It must be tough to be a priest in the modern age, preaching changeless values against a backdrop of falling church attendance and endemic levels of scepticism – but such is the lot of Father David (Joe Begos frequent flyer, Graham Skipper). He delivers worthy sermons to all-but empty pews, and knows that even a spiritual institution needs cash to prevail – which his church does not have – but he retains hope and works hard, doing his best to reach out to new people, and embracing his faith-based obligations towards the less well-off. You have to question the old edict that ‘you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, particularly because it could be an angel – or even Jesus himself‘, as this sounds suspiciously like a Secret Shopper scenario, but David preaches it: he even intends – he tries – to live by it.
As such, as he’s about to lock up the building one day, he finds a down-and-out trying to sleep there; he asks the man to leave (and really, it would have headed off a lot of stuff if he’d let him stay put), and the man, Terry (Jeremy Gardner) agrees to go, but – when David emerges from the church and overhears him on the phone, waiting for a ride which never seem to be coming, he offers to drive him to his destination. He asks to be taken to his girlfriend’s house, which gets ten minutes further away every time Terry describes where it is, but David drives him nonetheless. But there’s more. His girlfriend isn’t home, the streets are thick with snow, and Terry’s protestations that he’ll go and ‘sleep under a bridge somewhere’ just don’t sit well with David, who offers him a room for the night.
You know the drill. One night inevitably turns into several nights; soon, girlfriend Lexi (Taylor Zaudtke) arrives too, newly-homeless after being kicked out of her house; that this woman seems oddly familiar to David doesn’t ring alarm bells loud enough for him to ask these strangers to leave. Part of this is down to the rather obtuse hope that these two could constitute part of the new congregation he’s been after; after all, he rescued Rigo (Rigo Garay) from poverty and homelessness, and now he’s a kind of unofficial church curate. But if this is all part of some test by God, David can’t help but think he’s moving in ways even more mysterious than usual; the presence of these people is triggering more, far more, than just a mild schism between David’s charitable duties and his more worldly concerns.
In some respects, Terry and Lexi call to mind the man and woman who rock up at the door in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) – there to generate rising levels of vaguely theological chaos, with some rather more, shall we say, earthy punctuation points. Also akin to that earlier film, there are some minor elements of brash comedy here, which mostly land well. Terry’s foibles seem very familiar, incorporating ‘bad guest’ tropes we’ll recognise – smoking indoors, blasting heavy metal (it’s never jazz, is it?) – but thanks to Gardner’s strong track record as a kind of ‘people’s deadbeat’, it’s funnier than it is overfamiliar, and he gets some good lines – which he delivers in his by-now well established deadpan style.
But things move beyond this kind of testing farce, and get consistently more intriguing. The plot doesn’t simply step up to a wholly spiritual level – were it to do so, it would be pretty easy to guess at an incoming twist – but it does weave aspects of carnal and spiritual together – including with regards gender roles, in some unsettling ways. As the film hinges almost entirely on its characterisation and dialogue, we are encouraged to focus on the very human impacts of this series of unfortunate events, and Skipper is more than equal to it; he’s a sympathetic character when it counts, and a bewildering, complex character with unexplained subtext in turn. It’s being presented as a Christmas horror, and it – sort of – is, but mainly for the fact that Christmas drives things to a certain end point, and hovers in the background as context, something there to push people to even more faith, hope and charity, if they are so inclined. It also adds some visual elements into the mix. The Leech is a surprisingly complex, deeply mean-spirited and often surreal character study, albeit with a few moments of black comedy to lighten the overall mood.
The Arrow release of The Leech (2022) is available now on all major VOD platforms.