The Final Prayer Is a Lie

“The body is weak. The soul is fading. The ritual has already begun.”

From the moment the first shot flickers across the screen, Last Rites doesn’t just suggest unease—it burrows into your skin with the intimacy of a whispered confession. The debut trailer for the 2025 psychological horror film arrives not with screams, but with silence thick as incense, and dread that coils like smoke through the hollow of your chest.

Directed by Corin Hardy (The Nun, The Hallow), Last Rites is both an exorcism film and an elegy—a haunting meditation on faith, grief, and the terrifying question of who gets to be saved. Unlike most possession tales that escalate toward chaos, Last Rites dares to slow down, linger in shadows, and ask: What if the demon isn’t the only thing lying to you?

Set in an isolated monastery deep in the Scottish Highlands, the story follows Father Malachai Quinn (Cillian Murphy, in a role soaked with spiritual anguish) as he is summoned by the Vatican to oversee a dying ritual: the exorcism of a young woman whose body is failing but whose soul is, allegedly, already lost. What begins as a rite of passage soon becomes something far more blasphemous—an unraveling of theology, memory, and self.

The trailer itself is a masterclass in atmosphere. There’s barely any dialogue. Instead, it leans into sensation: candlelight flickering against stone walls, the scraping of a pew dragged across the floor, the slow, rhythmic breathing of someone unseen in the dark. The editing is disorienting in the best way—quick cuts between sacred symbols and corrupted rituals, a child’s prayer murmured backward, rosaries twitching on their own.

Hardy and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Ida, Cold War) conjure visuals steeped in ecclesiastical dread. Every frame feels like a forgotten painting, dusted in gold and blood. The monastery’s cloisters stretch into blackness. The stained glass weeps. Outside, fog drapes the moor like a funeral shroud, and time seems to dilate. There is no comfort, no mercy—only a mounting realization that something ancient is watching, and it is very, very patient.

But it’s the internal struggle of Father Quinn that gives Last Rites its marrow. Murphy portrays a man carrying decades of buried guilt—a priest who once failed a child under his care, whose prayers have long since turned to ash in his mouth. He is not a savior. He is a man desperately trying to believe again, even as the very thing he’s meant to cast out begins speaking in voices he thought he had forgotten.

The possessed, Isolde MacNair (played by rising star Morfydd Clark), is not portrayed as a writhing victim, but something far more unsettling: calm, calculating, familiar. She quotes scripture like a weapon, speaks truths no one else should know, and smiles with a kind of pity that suggests she sees not just your future, but your soul’s decay.

This trailer doesn’t offer jump scares. It offers questions. Why is the church so desperate to silence this case? Why does the exorcism seem more like a ritual of inheritance than salvation? And what does it mean when the demon seems more honest than the priest?

Hints of Hereditary, The Exorcist, and even The Seventh Seal ripple through the tone, but Last Rites stands apart in its solemn pacing and religious despair. There's something deeply tragic here. It’s not just a battle between good and evil. It’s a requiem for certainty, a slow death of conviction in a world where faith has become more of a performance than a promise.

By the trailer’s final frame—an unbroken shot of Father Quinn kneeling as the chapel behind him burns from within, smoke curling around his fingers like rosary beads—you realize the film isn’t just about saving a soul. It’s about whether anyone still believes such things are possible.

And then, just before it fades to black, the final whisper:

“We don’t bury the dead here… We keep them.”