‘The Exorcist: Believer’: Review

Dir: David Gordon Green. USA. 2023. 121mins

Fifty years after the late William Friedkin turned Peter Beatty’s novel ’The Exorcist’ into one of the most terrifyingly effective horror films ever made (and to capitalise on re-releases celebrating the anniversary), Universal unveils the first of its planned new trilogy of Exorcist films. Director David Gordon Green follows a clear brief — appeal to a younger demographic while also appeasing die-hard fans — and, in trying to walk this delicate line between legacy and invention, turns this tale of two young possessed girls in the state of Georgia is something rather muddy and surprisingly toothless.

There is absolutely nothing here to really turn heads

There have already been four Exorcist sequels and prequels between 1977 and 2005, but none matched the critical success of the 1973 original. (A 2016 TV series starring Geena Davis in a pivotal role effectively updated the story, but ran for just two seasons.) It is perhaps no surprise that Universal thinks Green is the man to breathe new life into this old franchise; his 2018 update of John Carpenter’s Halloween (also produced by Blumhouse) took $260m for the same studio worldwide, with two further sequels, Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), earning a further $235m between them. (Universal will also have one eye on Warner Bros’ Evil Dead Rise, another – superior – horror reboot which drew crowds earlier this year.) Enduring Exorcist fandom and a glossy marketing campaign should drum up solid business for this resurrection when it releases on October 6, even if reviews are less than glowing. A digital release in time for Halloween is not out of the question.

An opening sequence sees Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr) and his heavily pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracy Graves) on vacation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where Sorenne receives a traditional blessing for her unborn child. A sudden tragedy — dead mother as dramatic device klaxon — means that, 13 years later, Victor is a single father to his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), the pair living a relatively cloistered life in Georgia. When Angela and her best friend Catherine (Olivia O’Neill) go missing in the woods, Victor is beside himself. The relief when they return, three days later, is short-lived; in attempting to make contact with Angela’s late mother (a plot device used far more effectively in recent Australian hit Talk To Me), the girls have clearly brought something back with — or, more accurately, inside — them.

While the first third of the film takes a while to get going, things speed up once the girls return. Perhaps it’s that special effects have now become ubiquitous, or Freidkin’s slow-burn style of filmmaking has no place in Hollywood popcorn horrors, but Exorcist: Believer has none of the creeping dread of the original. Thanks to the girls’ unsettling (but familiar) behaviour, like scratching words into walls, suffering unexplained physical wounds and speaking in voices clearly not their own, demonic possession is quickly recognised by their parents, who set about doing whatever they can to rescue their kids.

The parents are quick to cotton on because the story operates in a world in which the events depicted in The Exorcist have become global knowledge thanks to the efforts of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burnstyn) the mother of Reagan (played in both The Exorcist and Exorcist II by Linda Blair), who has written a bestselling book about her experiences. (As a result, Reagan has distanced herself from her mother, a plot strand shared with the TV series.) Victor engages Chris’s help, yet Burnstyn has very little to do other than put herself directly in harms way — for an expert on demons and this one, Pazuzu, in particular, she makes some truly stupid decisions,

If Exorcist: Believer squanders the return of such a legacy character, screenwriters Green and Peter Sattler do the same with the story’s obvious undercurrents of religion and race. Setting this film in Georgia deliberately places it in a fiercely Christian state, and one with a history of slave ownership. These issues are touched on briefly, in mild exchanges between Victor and Catherine’s Christian, churchgoing parents Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz), and also with the introduction of Dr Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili), who practices rituals which, as she explains in one of many swathes of exposition, are a mixture of old African traditions and new world ways. Throw in a Catholic priest (EJ Bonilla), a pastor (Raphael Sbarge), a failed nun (Ann Dowd) and an Evangelical friend (Danny McCarthy), and you have a smorgasbord of personal faiths and tensions. Yet nothing is made of this deliberate set-up, and any potential differences are quickly set aside in the name of saving the children. 

But, of course, The Exorcist: Believer is less concerned with politics than with easy scares, and the eventual exorcism of the girls is its crowning set piece. Jewett and Marcum writhe and warp these girls into impossible, unnatural shapes. VFX and practical effects work is solid, with plenty of fan-pleasing moments — the famous 360-degree neck spin is effectively reimagined — and there is still some degree of fun to be had in watching the demon Pazuzu play his twisted games. But the fact remains that, despite endless jump scares, lashings of gore and a late-stage cameo which perhaps sets things up for The Exorcist: Deceiver (planned for 2025), there is absolutely nothing here to really turn heads.