REVIEW: ‘The Offering’ Is Not A Jewish Horror Movie

To understand my perspective on Oliver Park’s The Offering, you have to first understand where demonology fits into Judaism. The original Jewish religious texts, the Torah and the rest of the Tanach contain sparse mention of demons or hellish creatures. It’s not, not there. But it’s hardly worth a mention and rarely if ever talked about in Hebrew School, mostly because it’s written off as apocryphal or mistranslation. But Judaism has existed continuously for thousands of years. The Jewish people have been diasporic in nature since nearly the beginning, living among and being influenced by the hegemonies of their days from the Assyrians to the Babylonians, the Greeks and increasingly Christian Romans, to the Pale of Eastern Europe and Russia and North America.

Whether through explicit assimilation, a desire to fit in with the philosophers and theologians of their times, or simply the osmosis of coexistence, the bodies of Jewish thought and text recorded over the millennia picked up plenty of demonology along the way. Some of it is written right in the Talmud, the foremost body of ancient Jewish theology and law-making. Some of it is derived from apocryphal sources like the Book of Enoch. Whether it’s “canon” to Jewish theology or not, whether it’s originally derived from a neighboring culture, it’s unfair to say Judaism has no interest in demonology whatsoever, even if it’s far from a focal point or a regular part of Jewish ritual or culture.

But it’s ultimately a sideshow. It’s a curiosity that’s interesting to explore and not a whole lot more than that. So when the past year has presented the public with three movies similarly using Jewish aesthetics and religious-cultural language in the form of similarly premised horror movies, you’d be forgiven for believing that Judaism had a fixation on dybbuks and demonic possession, even if it’s patently untrue. So my criticism of The Offering begins here first and foremost: it’s not a Jewish horror movie.

Sure, of course, the movie is laden with Jewish characters and imagery—flawed as much of it is. But the demon at its heart is neither of Jewish origin nor depicted in an especially Jewish way. Jews may have believed in the Abyzou at the center of this tale, a demon that causes miscarriages and steals children. And certainly, Kabbalah and other highly syncretistic texts offer some color to an otherwise demon-less culture. But The Offering isn’t vested in these specifics. It merely uses Hassidism and Kabbalah as aesthetics to paint a “different’ picture for the horror movie’s background without meaningfully engaging with the culture or religion that it’s depicting.

Frankly, I’m tired of watching haphazardly-depicted religious Jews hyperfocus on Kabbalah, as if this is the most common or ubiquitous visage of Judaism. While writer Hank Hoffman is said to have at one time served in a Jewish morgue, I can’t help but be confounded by some of the choices in depicting the Hassidic characters. They speak almost exclusively English, the main character Art (Nick Blood) is evidently a lapsed member of the Hassidic community, he wears tefillin at a shiva, which is generally not proper practice (he’s also the only one in the room wearing it), and his father Saul (Allan Corduner) is inexplicably willing to give Art’s wife Claire (Emily Wiseman) not only respect as a non-Jew but a hug, which generally physical contact between genders, especially in front of other people, is prohibited.

On their own, none of these instances would raise too many hackles. It’s almost nice that seemingly this father and son, who have diverged so completely in their lives, can come together lovingly. But at the same time, it feels like The Offering is doing so while asking for a pat on the back for it. There’s a pregnant pause before the hug between Claire and Saul, for example, as if he’s going to decline on account of modesty. But then he does the complete opposite, and Art’s religious lapse and Saul’s apparent openness to Claire are just totally unexplained. They don’t inherently need explanations to be valid, but the movie acts like it’s begging us to ask why this is the case without ever telling us the answer.

Tired and confusing depictions of Judaism and Jews set The Offering up on shaky posts to begin with, but where the deal is sealed over whether I can call this movie a truly Jewish horror film is that it’s ultimately devoid of any distinctly Jewish modus operandi. If you took The Offering and reset it in a Christian morgue with some priests, you could easily have the exact same movie with the exact same haunting, the same dispelling of the demon, and same moral to the story.

To me, a Jewish horror story must be possessed of more than just aesthetics. Being truly Jewish necessitates being grounded in genuinely Jewish experience or theology. The Offering provides neither. The conflicts have nothing to do with the fact that the characters are Jewish in any way. Their motivations have nothing to do with their Judaism. The demon and the fight against it are not grounded in anything distinctly Jewish. And what little moral there even is to ponder does not strike me as a particularly Jewish ponderance.

There are a few lines here and there that suggest rather Jewishly that demons are formed of people’s sins, rather than as a force set in opposition to God. And there’s the briefest moment suggesting that Art’s dereliction of his religion could be a contributing factor to his being menaced. But they feel insincere as actual motives in this story, given they’re given basically no air to breathe after they’re uttered. Art doesn’t wrestle with God, the foremost notion of Judaism. His conflict isn’t religious, it isn’t historical, and it isn’t familial. It’s just selfish with no remorse, only recourse. And while selfishness isn’t uniquely or even particularly Jewish, atonement, which very much is a core tenet of Judaism, is nowhere to be found in the course of the movie either. Ultimately, The Offering is a movie trying so hard to prove it’s Jewish visually that it completely fails to actually be Jewish.

To give some credit where it’s due, there are some elements of the movie itself that are decent, though this is certainly not the word I would use to describe the movie as a whole. The setting is creepy enough, not quite feeling like any house I’ve ever seen in New York, but bearing enough of an air of the wrong century to work. The morgue itself in particular is pretty atmospheric as a set. I also quite appreciated Corduner’s acting as compared to Blood, who is very much just there most of the time, and Wiseman, who is grossly underutilized as a character considering the whole movie is about a demon trying to take her unborn child. Paul Kaye as Heimish, an assistant to Saul in the morgue is mostly a performance I appreciate for how he threads being, well, heimish.

But while most of the movie is dull and un-scary, as well as much too poorly lit in several key moments, the final act is definitely strong. The final confrontation, which has a reverse exorcism concept that should perhaps have been built up a bit more, is creatively shot and has some even great visual moments when the Abyzou is fully depicted. But most everything before then is a good bit of a drag.

The Offering isn’t a very good movie unto itself, but its greatest frustration is its use of Jewish aesthetics without ever feeling like an actually Jewish movie. It dresses itself in Jewish imagery but has no pintele yid (a Jewish spark or soul). The Jewish parts are tired and the parts I think we’re meant to see are Jewish are just generic demonology tropes with a coat of Jewish paint over them. And there’s just no apparent connection between the main characters’ misgivings and the demon he ends up encountering.

The Offering is available now on VOD.