Movie Review: THE OFFERING

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: January 13th, 2023 / 12:42 AM

Rating: R
Stars: Nick Blood, Emm Wiseman, Allan Corduner, Paul Kaye, Daniel Ben Zanou, Anton Trendafilov, Sofia Weldon
Writer: Hank Hoffman, story by Hank Hoffman and Jonathan Yunger
Director: Oliver Park
Distributor: Decal
Release Date: January 13, 2023

THE OFFERING is stylish, atmospheric and has fine performances. These qualities compensate for some increasing confusion about what its central villain can and cannot do.

An opening statement informs us of the myth of a female demon, “the taker of children,” described as early as the first century AD, across multiple languages and religions in Near East and Europe.

However, THE OFFERING is set in the U.S., specifically, Brooklyn, New York. We see a home full of occult symbols, books, lamps and burning candles. A man called Yosille (Anton Trandafilov) surrounds himself in a circle of ash.

The demon appears to him, first as his late wife, then as a little girl we’ll soon learn is the missing Sarah Scheindal (Sofia Weldon). “A life for a life,” she tells him. Yosille tries to banish the demon, with the results we’d expect this early on.

We then cut to Art (Nick Blood) and his pregnant wife Claire (Emm Wiseman) as they prepare for a long stay at the house of Art’s dad Saul (Allan Corduner).

Saul is a devout Hasidic Jew in this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. He has previously been pained by Art’s secular life and non-Jewish bride, but now wants familial reconciliation. Art and Claire would like this, too. However, Saul’s employee and best friend Heimish (Paul Kaye) is openly suspicious of the prodigal son’s return.

Saul’s large house is also the site of his funeral home and morgue, where locals congregate to have their loved ones prepared for burial. Yossile’s body is brought in.

This is where our first big question hits. It seems unlikely that the NYPD, no matter how obliging they are with any particular community, would release a corpse to a funeral home when cause of death has not yet been determined, much less a body with a knife still sticking out of the chest.

We soon have a lot more questions about what the rules are governing the demon. Without these, we don’t know what we should worry about, apart from jump scares. We get the broad strokes of what’s going on, but it’s not enough. The details are intriguing, but without knowing how they apply to the story, they provide texture without depth.

Director Oliver Park, working from a screenplay by Hank Hoffman, from a story by Hoffman and Jonathan Yunger, has a great eye for unusual shots. He gives us disconcerting angles on the action, and makes good use of space and background to add menace.

The actors are all good, with Corduner providing great warmth and tenderness, and Kaye conveying powerful emotion.

THE OFFERING is consistently pleasingly creepy, but its storytelling is, as one of the characters might put it, a little meshuggeneh.

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