The Satanic Temple is doing the Lord’s work. That statement is meant to be both provocative and ironic, just like the organization that Penny Lane’s documentary, Hail Satan?, examines. The film manages to be both hilarious and enraging. While it gets close to delving under the surface of The Satanic Temple’s leading members – most notably the tension between co-founder Lucien Greaves and TST Detroit chapter head Jex Blackmore – it never quite gets there. Hail Satan? stays at arm’s length from the people it’s documenting. That’s not the case with the ideas that Greaves, Blackmore, and other TST members are championing. The documentary does a fabulous job of explicating The Satanic Temple’s ideals and goals.
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When future filmmakers craft the pop culture version of history about our current political age – and what a sad, sickening history it will be – they’ll no doubt have an almost bottomless pit of stories to tell. Stories about people who worked tirelessly to uncover corruption, collusion, and incompetence at the highest levels of government. Let Liz Hannah and Josh Singer’s screenplay for The Post be a guide to telling those stories. It stands in the company of movies like All the President’s Men and Spotlight.
This is Hannah’s first attempt at feature screenwriting, and she wrote it solo in early 2016. Singer, who won a best original screenplay Oscar with Tom McCarthy for 2015’s Spotlight, was brought on board to do a rewrite just before filming began. Their movie is about the vital role a free and open press has in a democracy.
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