In another good year for documentary films, here is the probable Oscar winner. “Deliver Us from Evil” is an utterly devastating movie, more absorbing and shocking than most of 2006’s fictional releases.
The focus of the film is both narrow and broad. Specifically, it relates the story of the loathsome Father Oliver O’Grady, a rapist and pedophile who preyed upon children for many years while serving in parishes in California.
O’Grady did time in prison, and was deported to Ireland, his birthplace. His offenses have been on the record, yet filmmaker Amy Berg still goes at his story like a good, prepared prosecutor.
Along with finding church records and interviewing O’Grady’s former victims (and their families), Berg has scored a coup that puts her movie into the realm of Errol Morris’ stranger-than-truth documentaries. She interviewed O’Grady himself, who comes across as childlike and self-deluding, a horrifyingly clueless sociopath.
He relates his past abuses as though recalling memories of youthful indiscretions. At times he smiles, not sadistically, but with a “what-me-worry” shrug. It’s a reminder that evil comes in all kinds of forms.
Berg’s interviews with the parents of O’Grady’s victims are perhaps even more disturbing than the material with the victims. Not only are the parents angry, they’re also guilt-stricken: They invited the priest into their homes, brought their children to him, all the while faithfully contributing to the Catholic Church.
You will never forget Bob and Maria Jyono, whose lives have been destroyed by revelations of their daughter’s abuse. Bob Jyono’s explosions of grief and rage are all the more striking when laid next to the carefully worded responses of Catholic officials during videotaped depositions.
Berg’s film broadens its focus in examining the church’s response to all this. It’s a dispiriting record: When Father O’Grady was accused of offenses while at small Northern California parishes, the church would quietly move him to another parish, where he would abuse another unsuspecting congregation.
The film suggests that lurking behind these cover-ups was the man who is now one of the most powerful Catholics in America, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles. The film also suggests that after his prison term, the church took financial care of O’Grady to keep him quiet about his higher-ups.
In bringing these matters to dramatic light, “Deliver Us from Evil” might cause specific social change. But it’s also a gripping human document on many different levels – not least of which is the chilling spectacle of a criminal who doesn’t understand his actions.
Oliver O’Grady in “Deliver Us From Evil.”
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