Exorcist Daimon Helstrom struggles to gel with Vatican agent Gabriella Rossetti as she follows him around to observe his work and unconventional methods. Meanwhile his sister Ana is arranging auctions to lure out very particular types of criminal. And their institutionalised mother is causing trouble of her own.

If that feels like a slightly disjointed summary, then that’s because this opening episode of Hulu’s latest Marvel-based drama tends to feels a little disjointed, cramming as it does so much backstory and character introduction in a very esoteric setting into proceedings.

That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable – if a little hackneyed in places. Tom Austen is pleasingly snarky as the ethics professor who does exorcisms in his spare time and really isn’t here for the Vatican’s admin stuff. Think of him as every frustrated cop hero of every 90s action movie and the Vatican as city hall/his captain. The opening scene is actually a belter, with Daimon attending a suspected possession that doesn’t at all work out how you might expect and does a great job of introducing not  just his basic character traits but also the fact that he isn’t quite what he seems.

Similarly, his sister Ana, played by Sydney Lemmon, is the kind of morally grey protagonist that’s fascinating to watch: clearly not a great person but definitely – as it were – on the side of the angels, albeit possibly loosely.

Even Ariana Guerra’s Rossetti, who could be quite dull and straightforward, does a little more than one might expect. Granted, mostly she’s there as the audience POV character, to have stuff slowly drip fed to her by Daimon’s boss Louise Hastings – head of the institution where his mother is kept – but Guerra does a lot with the material she has. And it’s a nice change to see this sort of show have the Vatican not just be the automatic villains but rather a sort of bureaucratic annoyance.

It’s excellent character work all around, and you get to the end wanting to know more, but it does all rather feel crammed in, between revelations about Daimon and Ana’s mother and father, a sideplot which may or may not be connected to both, the developing relationship between Daimon and Gabriella, exposition about Daimon’s relationship to Louise, Ana’s own sidekick and their relationship and so on. It’s jumping from one scene to the next as it tries to get all this out and I’m hoping that’s simply a function of this being a pilot episode and trying to get its bookkeeping done early. If it lets these characters actually breathe, it feels like it could be something special.

Verdict: Slightly breathless scene-jumping aside, this does a good job of setting up some intriguing characters. I’m certainly on board for now. 8/10

Greg D. Smith