The Exorcist: Believer is a perfectly fine possession story hampered by its association to what many consider the scariest movie ever made. After breathing new life into the Halloween franchise – before quickly running it into the ground – writer/director David Gordon Green turns his attention to William Friedkin’s 1973 classic. Ironically, while the film is better than the several wretched sequels it ignores, Believer would be even more effective without the weight of its predecessor.
Leslie Odom Jr. stars as Victor, a father and widower living in Georgia with his 13-year-old daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett). In the film’s prologue, we learn that Angela’s mother died during an earthquake while she was pregnant; Victor, who was there at the time, had to choose who the doctors could save. This has made him overly protective of his daughter and insistent on maintaining a close relationship. When Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) go missing, Victor and his neighbors initially assume they lost track of time. When the girls return from the woods after three days believing that it’s only been a few hours, their parents grow further concerned. When strange markings and scratches appear on their feet and Katherine has a violent outburst during a communion service, some suggest that there’s more than psychological trauma at play. And when Angela reveals secrets about a former nun (Ann Dowd) that she has no way of knowing without supernatural help, the skeptical Victor is convinced enough to look up Chris MacNeill (Ellen Burstyn), who has some experience in this area.
The problem with making a possession movie post-1973 is that The Exorcist set up the template so well that everything afterward feels like a ripoff. The tropes are predictable: innocent girls suddenly growling obscenities, shadowy figures appearing in the background, loud bumps and clatters. Someone is usually tied to a bed or chair; levitation is often involved and bodily fluids are spewed. Near the end, there’s a religious authority figure with a crucifix and holy water, and everything climaxes with a goopy, gory special effects show.
Green dutifully checks off all the boxes and, to his credit, he largely does it well. Before he became a director of stoner comedies and then slasher movies, Green was acclaimed for his naturalistic take and skill with actors. Despite being an Exorcist reboot, he wisely avoids the opportunity to slavishly replicate the look and tone of Friedkin’s film, and Believer benefits from its shadowy, Southern setting. Green’s good with the scare sequences; while he steers free of trying to one-up the transgressive shocks of the original, he manages to craft some unsettling imagery and, even if he leans a little too hard on jump scares, delivers a movie that’s often intense and eerie.
The Exorcist gains much of its power from being less of a horror movie than a drama about dying faith and the ways we insulate ourselves from dealing with the possibility of anything outside our understanding. It’s a slow-burn whose atmosphere is often scarier than anything that happens in that upstairs bedroom. Believer takes a different tact; it’s a movie that reveals its supernatural leanings early and, perhaps fitting for the American South, is set in a place where everyone – except for Victor – believes in something. There’s an interesting theological twist in which it doesn’t lean solely on Roman Catholic practices or iconography. The people who help Victor combat this threat include a Catholic priest, an Evangelical preacher, a Charismatic pastor, and a healer who hails from a mixture of Christian and pagan traditions.
It leads to a third act exorcism that is sometimes a bit messy but is also a refreshing twist on the formula. As with his Halloween movies, Green is interested in stories of community; the Georgia town in which this takes place is initially portrayed as a divided, sometime hostile community. For Victor and his neighbors to prevail against evil, they have to put aside their self-interest and differences and work together.
Olivia O’Neill and Lidya Jewett in “The Exorcist: Believer.” Photo by Universal Pictures – © Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
It’s not perfect – several characters are a bit too thin for them to appear heroic, Victor’s switch from skeptic to believer happens too quickly, and the movie doesn’t flesh out Katherine or her family enough for us to be equally invested in her plight. Its final 15 minutes go a bit off the rails and the film is too interested in delivering gross special effects in its third act to deliver emotionally. But it has things on its mind, and Green handles it thoughtfully. He’s backed by a solid cast, notably Odom and Dowd. Odom is effective as a father trying to remain strong as he faces the possibility of losing his daughter and confronting the unthinkable. As a woman dealing with buried guilt and strong religious convictions, Dowd is the film’s standout.
On its own, Believer would be a perfectly serviceable addition to the possession sub genre. It’s not great, but it is effective. However, its attempts to make it an Exorcist film work against it. It’s not just the association with a classic film; it’s that the attempts to integrate the original’s characters and stories never feel organic. Burstyn is trotted out halfway through and then sidelined fairly early; she’s perfectly fine as she returns to the role, but the movie gains nothing from bringing in Chris MacNeill, who doesn’t even figure in the film’s final exorcism. There are hints that MacNeill – and, potentially her estranged daughter – might play a bigger role down the road (Green envisions this as the start of a trilogy), but the movie would play largely the same without Burstyn. Even “Tubular Bells” is used sparingly. Although the film was envisioned as an Exorcist sequel from the start, it feels like a generic possession movie with the IP shoehorned in. Excising it might have made for a stronger movie and given Green more time to let some of the side characters breathe, allowing it to be delivered from the spirit of the original.
