“God is not here today.”
In a final display of power, a retreating unit of Nazi soldiers hold a village of people at gunpoint. A priest is forced to choose an innocent person for execution in order to save the lives of the others. His offer of his own life is not enough. A young woman is killed and one life increases to ten. This isn’t war anymore; it’s sport. Sport in which inhuman men destroy people because they can. The priest, finally, desperately, chooses two men to die -- but, of course, it’s not enough. The prologue of Paul Schrader's Dominion: A Prequel To The Exorcist fades away.
How can such evil exist in a just world? Three years pass, and the guilt-ridden priest, now working as an archaeologist, has lost his faith. Yet the practice of archaeology is one one of both rationality and belief. This stretch of desert once seemed empty, yet found deep within its soil is an unexplainable church, built in the 5th Century and immediately buried. Such a discovery is, of course, only the beginning. But a start is better than nothing. As long as we believe in something, there’s always something to find.