When the institution becomes bigger than the idea which spawned it, a problem forms. Ideas are free-flowing, malleable, capable of change with new information or situations. Institutions are rigid, structured, and harder to redirect once a flow is created. If the ideas change and the institutions cannot, what emerges from the schism? To a degree, this is what writer/director/actor Paul Roland explores in his feature film debut, religious thriller Exemplum, which is off the festival circuit and currently streaming on Tubi. It’s an ambitious film that doesn’t always reach the heights it seeks, but the questions it asks of the audience and the fallibility of its characters give way to a chance to reconsider how one looks at the institutions in our lives.
Paul Roland as Father Colin Jacobi in EXEMPLUM. Photo Courtesy of Paul Roland.
Seeking a way to improve the lives of his parish, Father Colin Jacobi (Roland) decides to pull together his art and literature background to create a web series focused on spinning morality yarns that he calls “Exemplum,” after the term meaning “an example or model, especially a moralizing or illustrative story.” With each new story, Father Colin garners a little more attention for his parish and, inevitably, for himself. But just as he’s beginning to feel like he’s building something of value, fortunes change like shifting wind, and Father Colin finds himself at a crossroads of his own where each choice he makes is a new entry in an exemplum of his own.
Francis Cronin as Father Liam in EXEMPLUM. Photo Courtesy of Paul Roland.
Exemplum is micro-budget production, made for around $10K, and one gets the sense that creativity was key in executing Roland’s vision. The first element of this is the cinematography from Vlad Ionescu (Out of Sight, Out of Mind) and the visual elements applied to their work. From start to finish, Exemplum is in black and white, something which is either used to keep costs down, to achieve a specific look, or to convey a specific perspective. Viewed in a totality, it seems to be the second and third possibilities as the monochrome presentation, heavy grain, and seeming frame distortion (often found in lost, mishandled, or old footage) give Exemplum a specificity in visual language that dovetails directly into the narrative. One might think, given the moral, ethical, and religious questions that drive many of the characters through the narrative, that the monochrome is intentional to convey the grey areas in which we actually live our lives. While there is certainly some validity to this, Father Colin is by no means the pious man of the cloth he seeks to be, nor is he the pariah others would have him become; the utilization of monochrome and degradation of the frame correlates to a higher element of the film which can’t be identified without getting into spoilers. What can be stated freely, however, is that Roland is making a specific choice here, and it conveys to the audience that, as a filmmaker, this is a specific vision at work who’s interested not just in actor showcase reels but evocative storytelling.
Brittany Lewis as Lilly in EXEMPLUM. Photo Courtesy of Paul Roland.
The second element is the structure of the film as a whole. For better or for worse, the narrative plays with time a little bit, an aspect which is unclear until the very end of the film. It’s not so much that the utilization of the flashback post-intro mentioned before or that it doesn’t work here, it’s that there’re basically three introductions to the film, and two of them are slightly repetitious. The first defines the word “exemplum,” the second introduces us to Father Colin in distress, and the third introduces us to Father Colin’s show “Exemplum” — meaning that we’re hammered a bit with the word that defines the film while knowing that something is going to happen to Father Colin that’s coincidence or destiny. Playing with time is clear in some instances and less so in others. For instance, after the characters are mostly established, there’s a character interaction, that, whether on purpose or not, creates confusion for what follows in the rest of the film. There are a few scenes which utilize fast jump cuts, a filmmaking tool which can suggest distress, confusion, or some form of mental overload for a character, and the moments within the film where these are used don’t always warrant them. Thus, having a moment intercut with a jump in time creates unintentional chaos and immediate distrust with the characters involved in the scene. Given the thriller aspects of Exemplum, maybe we’re not supposed to trust anyone, or, perhaps, more likely, given the conclusion of the film and the total framing of the film, the cuts are indicative of the exemplum Roland’s devising in which we, the audience, are being challenged by the reactions we have when the nonsensical occurs. But even if it all makes sense at the end, the shroud that the unmarked time jumps place upon the film darken greater audience engagement with the characters. Placing the audience on edge risks shattering the immersion of the morality tale and puts them into the shoes of detectives putting together a puzzle.
Joseph Griffin as Louie in EXEMPLUM. Photo Courtesy of Paul Roland.
One thing that is not confusing, and Roland deserves praise here, is that the script makes it plain exactly who Father Colin is from nearly the beginning. There are some people for whom judgement will come and forgiveness may descend, but Roland creates, through script and performance, a man scrambling for meaning in their life by any means necessary, so much so that he’ll justify breaking codes of personal ethics and the cloth, opting for self-preservation always, rather than managing the hand dealt and existing within the rules he agreed to accept. Make no mistake, Father Colin is not a saint, believing himself called forth to punish the wicked; rather, the complexity of Exemplum is amplified by the fact that Father Colin wants too much, feels owed too much, to maintain a pure soul needed to lead a parish. Even when the script lays a few too many breadcrumbs, thereby tipping its mysterious hand ahead of schedule, the journey from one moment to the next is structed for maximum consistency — even in and out of time.
Paul Roland as Father Colin Jacobi in EXEMPLUM. Photo Courtesy of Paul Roland.
Exemplum is a raw tale from top to bottom. The performances lack the polish of higher budget productions, the script delves a bit into religious discord bordering on racist attacks (bad guys can be bad guys without dipping toes into antisemitism), and engaged audiences will likely piece together the time-spliced narrative fairly quickly, but, on the whole, there’s plenty of promise here that will warrant keeping an eye on Roland, mostly because there’s a daring here to ask big questions within an institution that’s overgrown past its intended purpose. That institutions far too often seek to preserve themselves rather than the ideas that spawned them and they tend to attract like-minded individuals thereby perpetuating problems instead of remaining malleable and within-purpose. Exemplum isn’t afraid to point out the frailty of community constitution and what it looks like when that’s taken advantage of. This makes Exemplum worth ruminating on; this makes what next big question Roland seeks to explore interesting.
Available on Tubi October 24th, 2023.
For more information, head to the official Tubi Exemplum webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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