THE TANACU EXORCISM The True Story Behind Beyond the Hills

In 2012, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu released Beyond the Hills, a two-and-a-half-hour film with no musical score, no demon, and no exorcist standing under a streetlamp while the orchestra announces that evil has arrived. What it has instead is mud, cold rooms, black robes, prayer, and two young women named Alina and Voichita. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and a shared Best Actress prize for its two first-time leads. And almost everything in it happened.

Alina never existed. Not exactly. The young woman she was built from was named Maricica Irina Cornici, and in June of 2005 she died on a hillside in Vaslui County, in the poorest corner of eastern Romania, inside an unfinished religious community called the Holy Trinity monastery.

This episode walks the real case from the beginning. Irina's childhood in a Romanian orphanage after her family came apart. Her work abroad as a nanny. The friend from the orphanage who told her there was room at Tanacu, and the January arrival that put her inside a closed world run by a twenty-nine-year-old priest named Daniel Petru Corogeanu, a former footballer who had never finished his theological training and who had already told his own bishop that canon law was a nineteenth-century invention written by Freemasons.

It covers what changed that spring. The giggling during Mass. The fast she said the Virgin Mary had ordered. The voice she said was the devil's, telling her she was sinful. The two weeks in a psychiatric hospital, the schizophrenia diagnosis, the April twentieth release into the monastery's care with medication and instructions to return in ten days, and the return that never happened.

Then June. The hands and feet bound during the Ascension liturgy. The boards nailed together with arm supports added as an afterthought, a thing that everyone who saw it afterward called a cross. The chains. The towel. Three days in the church with holy water on her lips and nothing else. The moment the priest declared her cured, the bread and tea, the collapse, the ambulance that took an hour to reach a community with no telephone, and the six doses of adrenaline given by a doctor trying to bring her back.

And then the parts most retellings skip. The hospital staff who looked at her wrists and called the police. The autopsy finding of dehydration, exhaustion and a lack of oxygen. The 2007 verdicts in Vaslui, the appeal that cut them in 2008, the Romanian Orthodox Church closing the monastery and defrocking Corogeanu, and his parole in November of 2017. The coroner who took part in exhuming her body years later and said publicly that what killed her was the adrenaline, not the boards. Corogeanu's own claim that his mistake was calling for help at all. Her brother's testimony that he watched Satan enter his sister. And the village where people will still tell you the priest did everything he could.

Finally, the road from a death to a screen. Journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran, who ran the BBC's Bucharest bureau, went past the headlines into court documents and village conversations and produced two non-fiction novels, Deadly Confession and The Book of Judges. Andrei Serban adapted the first for the stage. Cristian Mungiu saw that play in New York in 2007 while promoting his Palme d'Or winner, and five years later Irina became Alina. Then in 2017 an American production made The Crucifixion from the same case and did the thing Mungiu refused to do. It put the demon on screen, gave it a face, gave it music, and gave the audience the relief of knowing which explanation was correct.

That is the trade this season exists to examine. Hollywood hands you a monster so you do not have to look at the hillside. Before Hollywood, her name was Irina.

Hosted by Jeremy Hanson. Full archive at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.com.

.