Patricia Arquette plays the unbelieving everywoman, an unpretentious 23-year-old hairdresser whose pierced navel invites comparison to the titular Christlike wounds that she begins to receive. The doctors who treat her believe the injuries to be self-inflicted; only a likably scruffy priest played by Gabriel Byrne realizes that she may be some kind of messenger.

Byrne's holy man is sort of the Vatican's equivalent of a detective, hopping the globe to investigate weeping statues, appearances by the Holy Virgin, and other odd occurences with Catholic overtones. Jonathan Pryce plays his boss, a self-righteous cardinal who's engineering a cover-up. Naturally, the priest stumbles onto something big, and discovers that something's rotten in Rome.

Part of the problem is that the story (by somebody named, swear to God, Tom Lazarus) is so utterly conventional and bereft of surprises -- it's been given a shiny Hollywood gloss, and tweaks the Catholic Church by casting its lot with the kingdom-of-God-is-inside-you crowd, but still plays too much like one of those low-budget movies that cribbed its best bits from The Exorcist. Worse, rookie director Rupert Wainwright fancies himself enough of a visual stylist that he has to gussy up every scene with all manner of trickery, so that the jump cuts and nonlinear edits and fancy lighting pull you out of the experience rather than drawing you in.

Arquette keeps a straight face throughout, and Wainwright photographs her with what may be a nod to Renee Falconetti's legendary performance in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. In a film that respected itself enough to play this material without the flash edits, the brain-hammering sound design, and the show-off cinematography, her experience could be downright harrowing. In the context of this film, however, it just seems silly -- the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a music video, where the medium's inherent brevity might actually lend it some impact.