Jonah Naplan November 18, 2023
“The Exorcist: Believer” is a horrible excuse for a horror movie. A collage of one bad idea after the next, it’s an intersection of colorless machismo and dull characterization that works at the expense of emotional credibility. William Friedkin’s original “The Exorcist” from 1973 inspires (or doesn’t, for that matter) this latest entry in the recent Hollywood trend of horror remakes, which retreads its themes ad nauseam to the point of our inevitable exhaustion. It is an exceptionally lazy piece of work that juices out as many franchise callbacks as it can muster, just checking off its boxes for the mandatory legacyquel requirements.
Co-written and directed by David Gordon Green, who most recently helmed a trilogy of “Halloween” remakes to unsuccessful effect, “The Exorcist: Believer” follows a widowed father named Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.), whose wife died in an earthquake while on vacation in Haiti; she was very pregnant at the time, but thankfully the baby made it out OK. That baby grows up to be Victor’s daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett, a promising young actress who’s unfortunately given such lackluster material), and, reasonably so, Victor keeps a tight hand on her at all times. On the one day that he allows Angela to go home to study with her best friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), the two girls venture into the forest only to go missing for three days.
Desperately scouring the woods with Katherine’s parents (played by Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz), Victor discovers his daughter’s abandoned sneakers in a hidden shaft, which points towards the girls’ despairing fate. Of course, we know exactly what went down that afternoon; Angela and Katherine journeyed into that little burrow, communicated with an unholy spirit, and became possessed, emerging as Pazuzu’s little instruments of terror. But the parents don’t, so when they’re finally reunited with their little angels at the hospital, they’re dumbstruck by the blank stares and creepy vibes of their children, who, according to medical tests, don’t appear to be harmed at all.
The movie then acts as a Westminster Dog Show of all their vile tendencies and unusual actions; Angela is unresponsive to things she’d usually be excited about, wets the bed, turns bath water into a bloody hue, rips out her toenails, attacks Victor, and screams and wails obscenities; Katherine wreaks havoc at a Sunday church service—her family are devout Catholics—by destroying property and then walking down the church pews shouting “the body and the blood! the body and the blood!” Reasonably curious about what is happening to his daughter, Victor seeks the help of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the mother from Friedkin’s “Exorcist,” who has more knowledge than Paula (Ann Dowd), the Fieldings’ nurse neighbor, about demonic possession, which he begins to suspect is what’s taking place.
He turns out to be correct of course, but when Chris tries to connect with Katherine in her family home, she’s attacked, exiled to a hospital bed for the remainder of the movie, similar to Green’s treatment of Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween Kills.” The plot all eventually waxes and wanes towards a finale that ties Katherine and Angela to chairs back to back, while parents and priests spin around the duo, performing Bible verses and other holy chants, a climax that lacks emotional complexity or stakes.
“The Exorcist: Believer” is a movie that’s always doing just the bare minimum, even while it seems to be trying so hard. Its biggest shortcoming is wasting the talent of everyone involved; Leslie Odom Jr. was so good in Hamilton, and other projects of the current era, but is subjected to the most basic of clichés that have him either standing around talking to another character, or kneeling at the body of his daughter in despair; Jewett and O’Neill look to have such bright futures ahead of them, and they both give great physical as well as facial performances that will earn them some resume points later in life, but they’re betrayed by a wholly underwhelming script that offers no modicum of character development for them to explore; and the vision of William Friedkin is completely sanded down to pave the way for double the possession, but none of the thrills.
It runs at 111 minutes, which is long for a horror movie and too long for a bad one. But it also commits a major cardinal sin in the world of this genre, it’s boring. It is so boring. It doesn’t help that no one in the movie looks to be particularly excited about acting in it, nor does it help that the script is as formulaic as can be, streamlining oppressive nothingness into areas of dead air. From beginning to end, the movie is a series of dour events, connected by loose plot strings and false jumpscares with slight flickerings of Friedkin callbacks, so subtly embedded that they might as well not exist.
There’s too much yapping—by heroes, by possessed children, and even by those wiser than us all—but never enough doing, which is the difference between showing and telling, stopping and going, and this piece of garbage and a good horror movie.