'Deliver Us From Evil': The Snake That Returned to Ireland

We think of evildoers in cliched incarnations -- serial killers, Nazis, the Devil himself. Which is why we're totally unprepared for Oliver O'Grady. A 60-ish Catholic priest with a singsong lilt and twinkly-eyed demeanor, he's the kind of Emerald Isle figure we'd expect to see in, say, an Irish Spring commercial.

But in "Deliver Us From Evil," he's a rapacious, remorseless child molester.

O'Grady, we learn from Amy Berg's revelatory documentary, was a priest in various parishes in Northern California in the 1970s and '80s who sexually abused dozens of children under his spiritual care. One was only 9 months old. And his oldest victim was a middle-aged woman with a young son -- whom he also violated. Imprisoned in the early 1990s for sexual offenses against two young brothers, he was paroled after seven years and deported to Ireland in 2000.

Berg finds the defrocked priest in Dublin, five years later, ambling freely among Irish schoolchildren as he recounts his serial patterns of abuse with almost cheery glee. O'Grady's willingness to speak about his ignoble acts -- with such casual ease -- is the movie's strongest and most disturbing element.

While the audience recoils in horror at the disconnect between O'Grady's manner and his unforgivable acts, it will be powerfully drawn to the teary spectacle of former childhood victim Nancy Sloan as she reads a letter of apology O'Grady sent her in the 1970s -- the one declaring that he "went a little too far." And viewers will certainly feel for "Adam M.," now in his 20s, who haltingly recalls what O'Grady told him more than a decade ago as the unspeakable occurred. Everything was okay, the priest insisted. If it wasn't, why else would Adam's family leave them together?

"I would kill his mother," Adam declares later in the movie.

"Deliver Us From Evil" stokes audience anger even further with revelations -- courtesy of documents, videotaped depositions and interviews with anti-pedophilia activists, theologians, clinical psychologists and lawyers -- that O'Grady's superiors not only turned a blind eye to the priest's acts, they enabled them. Every time trouble arose, Roger Mahony, the former Stockton bishop and now archbishop of Los Angeles, shunted O'Grady to another parish and a new supply of victims.

While the movie persuasively argues that there's as much evil in the church's moral evasiveness as O'Grady's pathological behavior, it loses focus when it attempts to draw a wider conspiracy that reaches as high as the Vatican. Berg, a former producer for CBS and CNN, even dispatches a crew to follow two of the victimized families to Rome. In another movie, this might have made an effective scene. Here, it's off-message.

"Deliver Us From Evil" works best when it concentrates on O'Grady and the ever-rippling effect of his transgressions on his victims. Most affecting is one family's almost 25-year relationship with the man. It evolved from unshakable trust, as they housed him and gave him care of their child, to the predictable horror they experienced two decades later when they discovered the awful truth.

O'Grady, says one family member, "was the closest thing to God that we knew."

The source of that heartbreaking irony -- who, when asked, says he suffers from "dissociative disorder" -- remains maddeningly unfathomable. What do we make of a man who fails to understand why his letters of apology might not be readily accepted by his victims; who fails to see a link between the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, from a priest as well as his own brother, and his adult behavior; and who eagerly demonstrates the soothing voice he used to ensnare his victims?

Long after seeing this movie, viewers may not remember the victims whose stories practically pierce the heart -- as this, unfortunately, won't be the first time they've heard such testimony from the victims of Catholic priests. But they're unlikely to forget O'Grady's deceptively innocent face, the one that stalked innocents with such feral relentlessness. Nor will they have a problem understanding why Patrick Wall, a theologian interviewed in the movie, once described O'Grady as the "Hannibal Lecter of the clerical world." And it should come as no surprise to learn that, according to the Irish Times, O'Grady has fled Dublin, apparently in response to the publicity surrounding this movie. Biblical justice, it seems, has come full circle: that sweet-voiced Irishman who seems so unable to empathize with his victims is suddenly learning how it feels to be stalked.

Deliver Us From Evil (101 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated but contains profanity and themes of a deeply disturbing nature.