Director: David Gordon Green
Writers: Peter Sattler & David Gordon Green (story by Scott Teems, Danny McBride & David Gordon Green / characters from the novel by William Peter Blatty)
Starring: Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Ellen Burstyn
Before The Exorcist: Believer begins, one cannot escape the idea that this is all too familiar. A horror reboot-sequel that ignores the events of previous franchise instalments in favour of a direct follow-up 40+ years later, focusing on some new protagonists but a returning star of the original to “pass the torch”. And just as a bonus, it could be directed by David Gordon Green as part of an already in-production trilogy that will ultimately become the “end of the [insert title here] legacy”.
Colour me lethargic, but after bearing through the last legacy reboot-sequel trilogy from writer and director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride, The Exorcist: Believer wasn’t going to be a source of anticipation. Green and McBride’s Halloween series started well in 2018 with a respectable follow-up to John Carpenter’s original that didn’t break the mould but had enough slasher thrills to work. As we got further sequels Halloween Kills and Ends, it mutated into a nasty, insane and illogical series of empty slashers that favoured a hammer instead of a scalpel with its themes. The dark and creeping atmosphere of Carpenter’s masterful style is replaced with loud noises, excessive gore, and one-dimensional characters making the worst choices possible just so the plots could progress.
Most of this is still true for The Exorcist: Believer. One seriously questions why, with interest for Green’s Halloween films seriously decreasing as each one came out, is the same director allowed to fail upwards and do it all over again with another classic of horror cinema.
To its credit, and there is some to be given, Believer comes close to being good. Its opening in 2010 Haiti involving both voodoo spells and the fateful earthquake is a dramatic and focused establishment for the story. We follow Leslie Odom Jr. as Victor, a single father raising his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) in suburban Georgia, still grieving over the events of Haiti and as protective as possible over his only child.
One day after school Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) venture out into the nearby woods, go missing for three days but reappear thinking they were only gone for a few hours. As their parents try to return to normalcy, the girls are not the same and soon display horrific turns towards demonic possession, which exhausts medical professionals and leaves Victor and Katherine’s parents Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) turning to extreme measures of faith.
As was announced with this new Exorcist trilogy and revealed in the first trailer, Ellen Burstyn returns to the role of Chris MacNeil from William Friedkin’s 1973 original. When the character does enter Believer’s story as the parents have become desperate for answers, this writer was hooked and became convinced it was all going somewhere.
For the first half or so, Believer’s style is thankfully closer to the photography and pacing techniques that Friedkin explored with cinematographer Owen Roizman and editors Evan A. Lottman, Norman Gay, and Bud S. Smith fifty years ago, and helps this film feel like an Exorcist movie. Green and co-writer Peter Sattler’s script begins to clearly establish the emotional stakes for Odom Jr.’s Victor in a similar fashion to Burstyn’s Chris, make worse by the twin demonic presence at play with both girls, and effectively uses realistic medical investigations as a source of effective tension.
All hope is starting to drain from the parents lives as they realise they are all out of their depth and reach out to Chris, who has turned into an exorcism expert, though not an exorcist herself. There is also a steady progression of nurse and former nun Ann (Ann Dowd) and how close she is drawn into Victor’s crisis of inexplicable horror challenging his scepticism. Burstyn’s character has spent these past 50 years thinking about that traumatic event in her life as a mother and enters this story ready to face off against the evil that almost took her daughter away.
And then, simply, the movie stops being good.
All of the suspense and intrigue vaporises as Chris MacNeil is effectively dispatched from the active events of the plot and sidelined completely. Nurse Ann reaches out to a random priest we haven’t met before for help with the exorcism, Victor brings in a voodoo priestess, and Katherine’s parents recruit their local pastor, setting up for a finale of lukewarm proportions with far too many characters involved. The characters now speak in the same overlapping, obtuse and overwritten manner that ruined most of Green’s Halloween movies, and the script awkwardly pivots to new notions of the true meaning of God and religion.
It would be fairer to judge this film on its own merits, but because Green is actively trying to mimic the style of direction and writing of another horror classic made by a master, The Exorcist: Believer begs you to compare. The comparison reveals this movie as a lazy and almost safe one, even in its more extreme content and visuals of demonic possession. There isn’t anything these possessed girls do that is as horrifying as the original, the makeup for both lacks any real grotesque impact, and the whole exorcism finale is plagued by aggressively noisy effects that belong in a bad Conjuring spin-off movie. Indeed, this could have easily been called The Believer with all of Burstyn’s scenes removed and nothing would change. It wouldn’t be a dramatically better movie, but at least it wouldn’t be in the shadow of near-perfection.
David Gordon Green is not in the same league as William Friedkin as a horror filmmaker. Green’s own style is annoying, resorting to fast editing over a slow-burn atmosphere, jump scares instead of subconscious terror, and there isn’t a single frame of Believer that comes close to the majesty of Owen Roizman’s cinematography. Leslie Odom Jr. keeps things afloat as the lead, even if he isn’t “the exorcist”, and a significant emotional twist is sold entirely by his vulnerable presence, with the young actors Jewett and Marcum doing an admirable job playing the possessed girls.
An effective first half stops this from being a truly bad horror movie, but it is a bad Exorcist movie. There are no new pieces of imagery or thematic storytelling explored by the filmmakers, all of it recycling and diluting the best aspects of the 1973 original until it becomes sludge. The script and its demonic antagonist is devoid of eloquence , the cast is wasted with stereotypes and rushed character development, and The Exorcist: Believer fills one with despair that there’s somehow more to come.
