Maybe we’ve all been tricked. As Roger Ebert wrote in his scathing review of 2011’s stoner comedy The Sitter, “It causes me a real pang to report that ‘The Sitter’ was directed by David Gordon Green, who on the basis of his early work seemed destined to become one of the great American directors. Now he is lost and wandering in the wilderness of Friday night specials. I hope this is a temporary aberration.” Sadly, it is not. Hot off the financial – if not exactly critical – success of his rebooted Halloween trilogy, a largely pointless excursion that seemed to get increasingly execrable with each new installment (though the franchises’ third outing, Ends, almost works through sheer weirdness), Green was tapped to provide the same “legacy” treatment to an entirely more sacrosanct cinematic property: The Exorcist. The late William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic isn’t just a foundational work of its genre, but a widely-lauded masterpiece of cinema in general. Especially in the wake of his death, attempting to further monetize one of his most enduring works feels like desecrating a grave. The Exorcist: Believer, shot on an intentionally modest budget of $30 million, is slated to be the first chapter of a brand-new trilogy for Blumhouse Pictures, but the only thing it’ll make you do is question what possessed them to write it at all.
Co-written by Greene and Peter Sattler with a story by Greene, Scott Teems and frequent collaborator Danny McBride, Believer starts off with some initial promise. Opening on an extended prologue set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, we are introduced to Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.), a photographer on vacation with his very pregnant wife, Sorenne (Tracey Graves), just as tragedy abruptly strikes. The two are caught in the 2010 Haiti Earthquake (yes, the actual natural disaster, used here with dubious tastefulness), with Sorenne passing away as Victor must make an impossible choice: whether to save his gravely injured wife or their unborn child. Years later, that decision apparently made, Victor is a protective single dad raising his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett) in a comfortable suburb in Georgia. One day, she and her friend, Katherine (Olivia Marcum), go missing in the woods after school. The girls show up three days later, discombobulated and seemingly unaware of their disappearance. When increasingly dangerous signs of dual demonic possession begin to take hold, a skeptical Victor is forced to reach out to the only person he can think of whose dealt with this before: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the mother of Regan (Linda Blair), who was possessed 50 years prior.
The good news is that basic components of what worked in The Exorcist still work in The Exorcist: Believer, even if those elements are almost entirely borrowed from the original film. The possessed Angela, and especially Katherine, maintain the same level of profane grotesquerie in appearance that shocked audiences so monumentally back in 1973. The ghoulish makeup is appropriately icky, with frequent focus on torn-off fingernails and nasty black goop coming out of various orifices. To damn with even fainter praise, Green is at least attempting something more expressive behind the camera than he did with Halloween. Where that series, especially Kills, shoveled gratuitous violence into the audience’s faces without even a semblance of atmosphere, Green exercises more restraint here. The first hour is surprisingly bloodless, electing to build tension through a disorienting and harsh editing style that feels like diet Nicolas Roeg. The climactic exorcism, too, has one particularly nasty moment of gore that’s legitimately unsettling. It helps that Odom Jr. is a surprisingly strong lead, giving a committed and reserved performance that’s far better than the material deserves. Oh, and there’s a good remix of “Tubular Bells” in the end credits, I guess.
What makes Believer so frustrating to watch, and ultimately much worse than it would otherwise appear, is that it has absolutely no reason to exist. Not only that, but it can barely be bothered to justify its own existence as installment in its own franchise. Misleading trailers have attempted to position Burstyn’s return as akin to the transformative leading role that Jamie Lee Curtis played in 2018’s Halloween, but she’s in the movie for barely more than five minutes. The 90-year-old Burstyn has been trotted out, most likely with a hefty paycheck, to justify how this can be called an Exorcist movie, and not just an exorcism movie. It’s disgraceful and cheap, especially given the role she ends up playing. Otherwise, even the thematic similarities between Green and Friedkin’s work is negligible.
The truth is, it’s hard to make an exorcism movie that doesn’t feel at least a little bit like religious propaganda, and Believer is a deeply conservative and pro-Christian film. A friend who accompanied this critic to the screening aptly described it as “scary God’s Not Dead,” since the movie’s faith-based sensibility clashes frequently with its attempts at goopy possession horror. To add to this, there’s an uncomfortable subtext around Victor’s “choice” in the prologue that skews dangerously pro-life, as if to suggest that his daughter’s possession is at least in part because he made a choice at all. Friedkin’s Exorcist, which questioned religion rather than parroted for it, was never this nakedly fundamentalist in its perspective on sin and belief. In fact, it was rather sacrilegious, especially considering the unspeakable things Regan does to herself with a crucifix (one of many moments in that film that Believer never comes close to in terms of sheer, nervy horror). Green attempts to obfuscate these criticisms by having Burstyn suggest that exorcisms exist in all religions, but he can’t be bothered to actually explore the notion of believing in evil versus believing in the devil. Instead, we get a long monologue from Ann Dowd about the power of faith and resilience, again to suggest that trauma invites destruction and that the only way forward is belief. A $400 million joint effort between Blumhouse, Morgan Creek Entertainment, Universal and Peacock, the only thing possessing these producers is greed. Someone get an exorcist.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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