Pretentious nonsense.

Where exactly was it portrayed as an exorcism movie? Yes, it's based upon a real occurrence which contained multiple exorcisms, but if you went into it expecting just that, that's your problem, not the movie's. The exorcisms and her subsequent death are how the story ends. This was the story of the girl and the lead up to those events. It's clearly listed as a drama, not a horror. The plot summary on the main page here even says:

An epileptic girl suffers a breakdown during her first year at university, then decides to seek help from a priest in battling the troubles associated with her strict upbringing.

If you want to see the story with full blown CG and supernatural spookiness, that's what 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' is for. This take on the story was about a young girl with psychological problems compounded by an overbearingly religious mother.

Yes, you could argue that the ending was sudden and essentially you had all the foreplay with no money shot, but I think it suited the style of the film. When watching it I was actually thinking that the perfect moment to end it would be with them arriving back at the house, entering the front door, and being greeted by the priests, but they ended just before that. That was fine though - exorcism scenes have been done to death, and we've seen so many of them nowadays that we know what to expect. Also, if they had shown an exorcism scene, I have a feeling you wouldn't have liked it anyway. Given the aspects the film focused on it would just have been priests speaking, and the girl screaming. There wouldn't have been any levitating, temperature dropping, or demonic winds. Just the banality of a "real" exorcism.

more fascinating than the patronizing angle of 'Requiem.'

This one takes to one side which puts it all down to he mental illness and her faith. Plus, it's too muted to be really punchy.

I discovered Requiem after I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose. i watched them within a couple weeks of each other. I understand the drive to find poetic feelings rather than rational ones when watching a film, and I have to disagree with you that Emily Rose captured "Ambiguity" (I would call this complexity) better than Requiem. In many ways, Emily Rose seems trite compared to this film.

The most striking moment for me in Requiem was the final shot, because I had the realization that Michaela chose to die, and in many ways, by succumbing to a faith that in many ways was forced upon her in her final weeks and exacerbated her problem, she was freeing herself from a life of long-term struggle with mental illness.

In addition, while throwing away her pills may be portrayed as leading her into a declined state, if you read between the lines and perceive where she's at, and how it seems for many people with any so-called disability or illness that is told they require a pill or physical aid to rectify their problem, it is putting them into an altered state that is not trully themselves. There can be a purity or feeling of wholeness in dwelling in your natural state. If Michaela decided to surrender to her true self by letting go of her pills, that is a choice she made. Hana was the most rational of the group, but she also was perceptive and accepted Michaela's desire. So did her boyfriend.

The complex question here is ethical, and it is portrayed in this movie more explicitly than in Emily Rose. It is about who makes decisions for someone who is severely "mentally ill", that effect the core of their well-being, and is the "mentally ill" person capable of making decisions for themselves? If that person makes decisions that endanger their life, and someone believes they can help them, should that someone feel entitled or obligated to step in? Most of us will have to make related decisions like this about people we care about in times of crisis, even if not at this level of intensity or fatality, and it will always be based on our personal values and belief systems.

I feel like this was an honest portrayal, and having grown up in a Catholic household, some of it was a little too familiar. There is a conflict in the modern Catholic Church between intellectualism and superstition, and rational vs. irrational drives. Interestingly, some of the most intellectual Catholics I've ever met were also the most superstitious... The mother and the younger priest seemed slanted negatively, but they seemed more real to me than any other character besides Michaela.