What's the point of a new Exorcist movie in 2023, 50 years after the original film? For the studio, the answer is easy: This is a famous brand that could be reinvigorated the same way Halloween was in recent years. For David Gordon Green, the director responsible for both that Halloween revival as well as The Exorcist: Believer, the answer isn't so clear--at least not from watching the movie.
On paper, this new Exorcist sequel should be interesting. It was co-written by Green's Halloween trilogy collaborator Danny McBride, star and creator of HBO's The Righteous Gemstones, of which nine episodes have been directed by Green. These are folks you would think have some things to say about this subject matter. But while The Righteous Gemstones lampoons evangelical Christian culture at every opportunity, Believer has nothing but respect for all religious establishments. It's a little bit puzzling, to say the least.
The Exorcist: Believer centers on Victor (played with a mesmerizing almost-stoicism by Leslie Odom Jr.) and his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett)--Angela's mother died giving birth after being massively injured during an earthquake in Haiti, and the tragic circumstances of her birth linger with Angela. So Angela takes her mom's old earrings, and she and her friend Katherine go off into the woods to try some kind of seance. It's not even really that serious of a thing--the two are laughing at themselves while Angela tries to talk to the earring.
But then they vanish into thin air for three days, before popping up in a barn 30 miles away with no explanation. And they're different now--Angela and Katherine are quiet and abrupt initially, and then they gradually turn into the creepy demon-possessed terrors that we knew they would.
When psychiatric treatments fail, Victor and Katherine's parents are forced to look into other potential solutions, including exorcism. But unlike the original Exorcist, it's not a Catholic-specific situation--Victor isn't religious, Katherine's family is evangelical--and we also get a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal-type of person and a pagan priestess for good measure. Oh, and Victor's Catholic neighbor gets involved too, so a Catholic priest does come into play. All of these different groups are treated as equally real and valid--Believer suggests that all spiritual beliefs exist as a means to battle demonic possession.
And on top of all that we've also got Chris McNeil, the mother of the possessed Regan from the original movie, played with aplomb by the great Ellen Burstyn. Her scenes, of which there are only a couple, are certainly action-packed and entertaining, but they're also weirdly extraneous--I think you could remove every reference to Chris McNeil and Regan from Believer without needing to rework any of the rest of it, which gives Chris's inclusion the feel of a late-stage re-write.
Green and his editor, horror vet Timothy Alverson, establish a really creepy vibe in Believer--the jump scares all work, and the experience of watching this movie, especially in a loud theater, is both intense and a lot of fun. After three Halloween movies together, they seem to have a good handle on how they want their horror to play, and their sort of experiential formula really works. On a pure horror level, The Exorcist: Believer is very effective, though it doesn't go as far in search of its thrills as the original movie did--don't expect anything on the level of the famous masturbation scene in Believer.
But there's a bigger problem here--the original film is a classic in the general sense, not just as horror, and Believer wants to position itself as the true successor to that mantle by disregarding the rest of the franchise, like Green did with Halloween. Halloween was never a classy property, though, and The Exorcist is--the original movie was nominated for ten Oscars and won two of them. And that may be the problem.
The Exorcist had an immense cultural impact in the 1970s because it was hugely disturbing in surprising ways, and stuck with audiences long after they left the theater. Believer lacks that same oomph, opting instead to remix the original without taking it anywhere meaningful that the original didn't already go. Or at least meaningful to me--as a person who was raised by evangelicals in the Deep South and then fled to the West Coast to get away from all that, the cross-denominational religious alliance they put together in this movie doesn't do much of anything for me.
That said, without spoilers: The ending rules. It's going to make you feel bad, but it's the one aspect of Believer that does actually feel like a step up from the original movie.
What this all adds up to, I think, is a very solid new Exorcist sequel. It's legitimately spooky and had me shouting in surprise a bunch of times, which I loved, but I think Green and co. wanted Believer to be more than that. Unfortunately, that's all it manages to be.
