7 October 2023
Once again, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride have taken it upon themselves to futz about with a 1970s horror classic at the behest of horror uber-producer Jason Blum. So far their track record ranges from “pretty good” (“Halloween”), to “should’ve never seen the light of day” (“Halloween Kills”), to “huh?” (“Halloween Ends”), so expectations should be riding low for their take on the 1973 William Friedkin classic “The Exorcist,” now re-imagined as “lega-sequel” “The Exorcist: Believer.” Keep those expectations planted firmly in the gutter because after this encounter, you’ll likely be left thinking, “can Pazuzu just give it a rest?”
“The Exorcist: Believer” is an exhausting affair, an unrelenting film that attempts to cover up its lack of shock and suspense with a kind of cinematic bludgeoning: a battering about the face and head delivered via smash cuts, jump scares, overlapping sound design and chaotic camerawork. Yet despite all this stylistic violence, all the demonic histrionics — there’s not one but two possessed tweens this time — grows tiresome almost immediately.
Leslie Odom Jr. stars as Victor, a single dad who lost his pregnant wife in a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. His daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett) survived, and now, at age 13, her desire to connect with her dead mother results in the thinning of the veil that allows the demon to penetrate her psyche, along with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum). Whether it’s Pazuzu or Captain Howdy or whomever, this particular entity knows about his original host Regan MacNeil (played by Linda Blair in the first film). The girls scratch her name into the walls with their bloodied fingernails, and hurl invective at her mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn), whom Victor has sought out for her counsel on this matter.
With writers Peter Sattler and Scott Teems (Sattler and Green penned the script; Teems, Green and McBride are responsible for the story), Green and McBride take a similar approach to “The Exorcist” that they took to “Halloween.” The original films are character studies first and foremost, closed systems that allow for a depth of exploration. Green and team are more interested in the spread of horror, how horror touches many within a community, and how groups of people can rely on each other to fight back.
That approach results in a film that is wide, but shallow. This is not a deep character piece but rather, a group project, one in which we barely know the other members of the team. Victor’s neighbor, Ann (Ann Dowd), a nurse and former novitiate, enlists a priest, Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), to perform an exorcism on the girls. We barely get to know the guy, he’s just sort of there until he isn’t.
There are other players who prove more useful, and more fascinating, like the African priestess Dr. Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili), who brings her root magic to bear on the demonic presence. It’s nice to see an “Exorcist” movie liberated from the constraints of Catholicism, and with two possessed girls, they’re going to need Jesus, Jah and whomever else can be spared for the job. Green wants to spread a message that’s less about faith in a patriarchal Judeo-Christian God and more about the people who come together to save their young by any means necessary. As Chris exhorts Victor, after all of her research, exorcism is about the people, first and foremost.
Noted. That comes through loud and clear, but it’s just a shame that we don’t particularly care about any of these people. Odom’s Victor is the character we care the most about, because we know him and his history best, and his skepticism in the face of such horror becomes a fascinating obstacle. What can he believe in enough to save his daughter? But everyone else feels like archetypal set dressing scattered about like narrative devices, not actual people. Katherine and her parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) are particularly ill-served by the script.
The girls thrash and wail, the demon growls unspeakable things, but it’s nothing we haven’t all heard and seen before. It’s a whole lot of noise without anything particularly original to say, It’s a film that lacks all the elegance and sophistication of the original text.
Back in 2020, the late great William Friedkin tweeted, “there’s not enough money or motivation in the world,” to get him to return to “The Exorcist” — the key word here being “motivation.” What’s the motivation for “The Exorcist: Believer”? Clearly it’s the money, but this noisy effort isn’t even worth your attention.
‘The Exorcist: Believer’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references)
Running time: 1:51
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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