In hindsight, The Exorcist: Believer poster I discovered tossed in a urinal within the movie show toilet earlier than tonight’s press screening was in all probability a unhealthy omen. You would possibly even name it a signal from God. And like so lots of the silly mortals on this new movie, I did not heed His warnings. For my sins, I used to be damned for the subsequent 111 minutes.
What occurred right here? The director and co-writer, David Gordon Green, has had success prior to now updating basic horror franchises. In 2018, he continued the unique Halloween in a method that felt trendy, well timed, and scary. Green used that supply materials to inform a story in regards to the lingering psychological results of trauma on a survivor like Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode. The same premise wafts via his model of The Exorcist, to no discernible impact. Some of Green’s selections listed here are downright unusual — like the truth that this film doesn’t actually have an exorcist character. If your movie is known as The Exorcist: Believer, shouldn’t it have a type of?
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Instead, Green focuses on a photographer named Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), a single father who hovers over his 13-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) as a result of her mother died in childbirth and made him vow to all the time defend their youngster. Victor received’t even let poor Angela go to a buddy’s home after college to do her homework. C’mon Victor! It’s simply homework at a buddy’s home! What may probably go mistaken?
Well, for starters, each Angela and her buddy Katherine (Olivia Marcum) may go lacking for 3 days, then flip up 30 miles away with no reminiscence of how they acquired there or what they did within the interim. They may additionally start displaying the telltale indicators of demonic possession: Wounds that received’t heal, talking in tongues, excreting unusual bodily fluids, the works. Victor is understandably skeptical in regards to the existence of a benevolent god after the entire hardships he has endured, however his deeply religious neighbor Ann (Dowd) is satisfied that there are Satanic shenanigans afoot. She provides Victor a guide about exorcisms, which he instantly tosses apart. Then he sits down, waits about 4 seconds, picks the guide again up, and is instantly satisfied that his daughter is beneath the thrall of Pazuzu.
It seems Ann’s guide was written by Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the heroic mom of Regan, the possessed lady from the unique Exorcist movie. (You know, the Exorcist directed by William Friedkin that truly had an exorcist in it.) Chris counsels Victor about the right way to cope with Angela’s plight, and warns him that skepticism will solely take you to date. When your daughter can learn folks’s minds and bleed from any orifice on the drop of a hat, that looks as if wise recommendation.
And then … nicely, I in all probability shouldn’t say what occurs subsequent. But I’ll say that the way in which The Exorcist: Believer makes use of Burstyn made me a little offended. Why deliver her again in any respect if this is what you’ll do together with her? (There have been 5 Exorcist prequels and sequels earlier than this one, and Burstyn by no means appeared in any of them.) The worst half is that Burstyn’s scenes are the one good ones in The Exorcist: Believer; the remainder of the movie may have used her steely presence and haunted line readings.
Instead, Believer swiftly descends into unhealthy horror film hell. Although I’ve no first-hand information in regards to the manufacturing, it seems that this Exorcist could have been closely truncated and reworked in post-production — most clearly in a scene the place Burstyn delivers a two-minute monologue virtually totally off-screen whereas the digicam focuses on an limitless closeup of Odom’s face. Then all of a sudden it’s exorcism time, although the movie has spent lower than a handful of minutes with its one Catholic priest character. Much of its meant rigidity hinges on Victor, and whether or not he’ll start to imagine in God. But whenever you’ve seen two women sprout scars out of skinny air, converse with evil demon voices, and synchronize their heartbeats, it doesn’t take a entire lot of religion to entertain the notion of a greater energy.
The Exorcist positioned its supernatural story in a grounded and believable world, which made it all of the scarier when Linda Blair’s head began spinning round like a rusty carousel. Set in suburban Georgia as a substitute of Washington D.C., The Exorcist: Believer by no means creates something like that sort of lived-in actuality or characters we develop to care about. Victor’s total persona is that he’s an overprotective dad (apparently with good motive). Early scenes vaguely nod on the method trendy Americans thoughtlessly mistreat their neighbors, but when that was meant to construct to some sort of cathartic payoff later within the movie that materials acquired lower, together with any scenes that may have fleshed out the opposite lacking lady’s mother and father (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) into something past cartoonish stereotypes of God-fearing churchgoers.
People routinely label Exorcist II: The Heretic as one of many worst sequels ever made, however not less than that film was going for one thing. Whatever its flaws, it had some concepts and it’s by no means boring. The Exorcist: Believer commits that sin, and so many extra.
RATING: 3/10
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