Let Us Prey

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

~Mark Twain

It's a well known fact that the Devil often goes down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal. But even the Devil has standards, and swindling cornpone Republican dimwits out of their sweaty cracker souls doesn't provide much of a challenge after a couple hundred years. So, come 2014 and Ol' Scratch decides to wander up Scotland way, as far north from the Mason Dixon line as he can possibly get without being subject to a steady diet of lutefisk.

There's not much call for chickens in the bread pan, picking out dough up north, so instead the D-Man makes a dramatic entrance on the rocky coast, vomited up by the deep blue sea and escorted by a veritable murder of crows. For some reason, he looks exactly like Davos Seaworth, the Onion Knight and official Hand to King Stannis Baratheon...who isn't even a king and doesn't deserve to be anyway after allowing his daughter to be burned at the stake because the night is dark and full of terrors or some such shit. But I digress.

Liam Cunningham, aka Davos Seaworth, is our unnamed main character, neither protagonist or antagonist, just cool as fuck, striding through the Scottish countryside like a total badass, chainsmoking and squinting harder than Clint Eastwood in a dust storm. The tiny cobblestoned village he wanders into has no name and an approximate population of fifteen people, fourteen of whom are serial killers...including three of the four members of the local police force. The fourth one is a block faced rookie named Rachel, who achieved small town celebrity years earlier by being the only survivor of yet another serial killer/child rapist. Now she's a haunted, straightlaced, by-the-book beat cop, whose presence is resented by the other three cops: her boss, the closeted gay Jeffrey Dahmer-esque captain, the slutty female cop and her piggy partner whom she spends most of her night shifts banging in the back of their squad car. When Rachel arrives for work, already having arrested a troublemaking teen for drunk driving, her efforts aren't appreciated or rewarded and into the drunk tank goes her catch, locked up along with a high school teacher who beats his wife. Jesus, the cast of Trainspotting had more promise than this fucking town.

Anyway, they are soon joined by a local doctor who has viciously slaughtered his entire family, small children included, and Liam Lucifer up there, who appears to have been a hit and run casualty at first, sporting a superficial head wound and remaining stubbornly mute. He seems content to sit and stare at Rachel and give everyone else a walloping case of the creeps. Eye contact with him proves lethal as he seems to know everyone's deepest, darkest secrets and drives all of them to homicidal rage. Pretty soon, everyone is killing everyone, or plotting to kill everyone, or getting ready to kill everyone after killing everyone else. Everyone except Rachel, that is. She's trying to stop everyone from getting killed by everyone and trying to avoid getting murdered by everyone except for Liam, who doesn't seem the least bit interested in harming anyone. He's too busy levitating matches, plucking black feathers from the air and driving his cellmates to confess their ugliest sins. He never comes right out and says he's The Devil, but he drops enough hints along the way. He also has a habit of popping up out of the shadows whenever there's a deceptive lull in the narrative, all Exorcist-Eyed and freaky.

Honestly, the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense, the characters are wild caricatures, the events that unfold comparable to dropping acid and getting lost inside of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride for an hour or so and the probability of so many people in the same vicinity being so skullfuck batshit crazy so farfetched that I gave up trying to take it seriously about 20 minutes in and decided to view it as a Marvel Comics version of a fable by Aesop. Liam Cunningham makes it entirely, enjoyably watchable simply because he's not Vin Diesel or someone similarly slimy. Cunningham is intensely likable, even as Satan, and though his relationship with Rachel is and remains somewhat muddy, we don't really give a shit. He's the only likable character in the entire film. Think about that a second - Satan is the only character in the entire film that you care about and want to see triumph. I haven't welcomed the presence of a cinematic Satan this exuberantly since Peter Stormare showed up at the end of Constantine to save us all from the blandness of Keanu Reeves.

So yeah. Let Us Prey - as perhaps indicated by its title - is cartoonish and overwrought and more than a little ridiculous, but it's fun. Bloody and nihilistic, ugly and mean, but entertaining as fuck.