Whatever one wants to say about John Boorman’s absolutely maniacal and much-maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic, it certainly isn’t unimaginative. By contrast, David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer very much is. The film, written by Green and Peter Sattler, is a mélange of tired normcore horror tropes indistinguishable from any film in the Conjuring universe. It even fails to address the series’s most basic themes in any truly meaningful way beyond a conviction-less “can’t we all just get along” subtext regarding the divide between America’s secular population and religious conservatives.
The film’s cold open in Haiti hints at a unique, voodoo-tinged—that is, non-Catholic—take on the franchise’s fascination with crisis of faith. But Haiti turns out to just be a random place to witness Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) struggling to make a very difficult choice between saving his injured wife or his unborn daughter, Angela. Victor apparently chooses his child, and 13 years later, in Georgia, Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her best friend, Katherine (Olivia Marcum), go missing in the woods after trying to talk to Angela’s dead mother, and reappear three days later with some seriously horrific injuries—and one hell of a demon problem.
What little Exorcist: Believer has to offer in thrills and chills comes from the stretch that follows, during which Angela and Katherine mentally and physically deteriorate in tandem. The demonic motions are often grisly, at times even distressing, but the film struggles, both thematically and dramatically, to take its setup to the next level.
Much time is spent contrasting Victor’s science-forward approach to treating Angela with the old-time religion that Katherine’s parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) embrace, and the next-door neighbor nurse played by Ann Dowd gets a captivating backstory and works to ease Victor into the idea of reaching for faith. But the film has little to say about either, beyond proffering vague notions of goodness being needed to overcome the devil.
For a series built on a bedrock of Catholic guilt and despair, that’s a cardinal sin by itself. Others include a wholly unnecessary Ellen Burstyn cameo that goes almost cruelly awry and a hilariously wrongheaded gathering of various faiths that makes it seem as if we’re watching an Angel Studios production of The Avengers. As for the exorcism, while it has its unnerving moments, it fails to accomplish with an obscene amount of expensive CGI what Friedkin was able to pull off with a cold room, a can of pea soup, and Mercedes McCambridge’s voice.
Hell, Gordon Green’s twin devils don’t even talk all that much, resting much of the film’s narrative weight on the flimsy circumstances of Angela’s birth rather than any sort of conflict and tension tied to God’s role in all this. The film’s most basic fundamental problem, though, is the simple fact that every exorcism story is ultimately a conversation with the devil. With so much of the script focused on feel-good platitudes, generic monsters, and shallow characters rather than religious exploration, Exorcist: Believer has nothing to add to that conversation.
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