When his daughter, Angela, and her friend Katherine, show signs of demonic possession, it unleashes a chain of events that forces single father Victor Fielding to confront the nadir of evil. Terrified and desperate, he seeks out Chris MacNeil, the only person alive who's witnessed anything like it before.
Director: David Gordon Green
Cast: Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Lidya Jewett, Olivia Marcum, Ellen Burstyn
Release Date: October 6, 2023
Genre: Horror
Rated R for some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references.
Runtime: 1h 51m
David Gordon Green's The Exorcist: Believer is more than capable of echoing William Friedkin's original, especially during its opening act, but it ultimately proves to be nothing more than hollow mimicry. Green hits some incredibly familiar beats throughout this legacy sequel with camera shots or visual cues but there's a noticeable disconnect as the film rapidly moves through sequences to get to the possession portion of the film. Once those moments arrive, we're treated to a series of cheap jump scares and gore that feel more in line with the Insidious films than a direct follow up to the original Exorcist. The script doesn't help matters much since it throws a series of one dimensional characters at the screen and expects you to care about them. There's a kernel of a solid idea that expands the idea of evil beyond the Catholic rite but the story has no idea how to take a nuanced, measured approach to the subject matter. Instead, the film devolves into a series of standard shocks we've seen plenty of times before which highlights the fact that script and director doesn't understand what made the original so effective and unsettling, a sense of grounded humanity. It’s a missed opportunity on multiple levels especially since the film is blessed with game actors who are looking for something more substantial. Leslie Odom Jr. turns in a earnest performance as the father of one of the possessed girls. Odom Jr. does his best with the smallest slivers of depth the script affords but the film simply doesn't have the patience to let any of it germinate organically since it wants to get to the next scare as soon as possible. Norbert Leo and Jennifer Nettles fare even worse as they are given the thankless roles of the parents of the other possessed girl who characterization is little more than broadly written evangelicals. Ann Dowd, who plays a neighbor/nurse with a past, seems perfectly suited for this type of role but the film also rushes through her backstory which robs the character of any sort of emotional weight. The biggest misstep is getting Ellen Burstyn back into the fold only to misuse the actress and character to a shocking degree. That kind of haphazard mishandling of the material just shows that while The Exorcist: Believer might be able to create a facsimile it clearly never understood the material of the original.
C-
