'Scenes from an Empty Church' is a very overt entry in the small canon of Covid filmmaking. Set in a large Manhatten Catholic Church during the height of the lockdown, the film focuses on the resident priests and the few parishioners and others they start to slowly let come into the sanctuary, generally for only brief periods and by appointment.
The film is directed and written (adapting a story by another) by Onur Turkel. Turkel had done some writting on the Bob Byington film 'Infinity Baby' so the works of Byington are the closest reference point I have for this film and its tone. Turkel is arguably marginally more dry then Byington, but he's only about half as surereal. Kevin Corrigan is in this as well and he's worked with Byington before.
Corrigan and Thomas Jay Ryan are the two priests, there used to be a third, an older man, but he died from Covid near the start of the pandemic. That priests death has particularly effected father Thomas, who latter confesses to Father Kevin, in what was a difficult thing for him to voice, that the two loved each other. They kept their vows but were essentially a celebite gay couple. Father Kevin surprises Thomas by telling him that he knew this already. For one thing they loved the theater far more then your average Catholic priests. Father Kevin has a confession of his own that is also dryly funny.
This movie hardly feels like a movie, more like an episodic play. It glides along at a fairly consistent level of wry amusment, at least once the two father's start opening the church. There are a couple of events near the end of the film which felt particularly Byington like to me, one very surreal, and they were among the least effective parts of the movie to me because by this point I had adapted to appreciate Turkel's subtler voice. A mixed bag of a film, but one that does not require a lot of attention, so could be good for film grazing. **1/2
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