Streaming Availability: In Theaters
SPOILERS!
It was not my intention to end Spooky Month on a series of downer reviews about new movies I didn't like. I thought all these films, even an Exorcist Legacyquel, had potential. I should have known better considering the new Exorcist was directed by David "Evil Dies Tonight!" Gordon Green. I'm going to be as charitable as I can to this movie, despite my previous run-ins with Green and his creative time. I do not know what he, or his various horror collaborators such as Danny McBride are going for. That first Halloween reboot was really good and then everything else has been awful. I do not think this team has much skill beyond imitating Seventies horror directors, and certainly they have nothing interesting to say. Despite the title of today's movie, I do not know if Team Green believes anything of this. I get the sense this is all a joke to them.
You know, 2023 has a lot of really good horror movies. The newest Saw movie is great. Talk to Me rules and I could have said that's a demon movie. But here we are...
There are good things in The Exorcist: Believer. David Gordon Green at least can replicate the slow-build of the original, and the cinematography is not terrible. Clearly Green respects William Freidkin in his imitation of him, with long lingering shots of exotic locations (a long Haitian prologue fills the same beats as the Mosul sequence did in 1973). There's some clever editing transitions, cutting between a scream and a car horn is a decent filmic idea. I really like that the central family of Believer is African American, who are very underrepresented in these demonic possession movies. Leslie Odom Jr. is a great leading man as Victor, the single-father hopelessly watching his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett) descend into horror. I'm not even against Believer being the most "sequel" of all the Exorcist sequels, being about a possessed child where none of the other films were. You can cover the same ground as long as you have new ideas.
The problem is that The Exorcist: Believer does not have new ideas. The best idea it is has is just to double the stakes: 'Instead of one possessed preteen girl, let's have two!' Olivia O’Neill plays Katherine, Angela's schoolmate from a White family. Both girls disappeared for three days after leaving school (shades of Villeneuve's Prisoners here), only to reappear with demons crawling around them, causing rapid body horror and jump scares. There is some interesting work with the culture clash of the liberal Victor dealing with Katherine's extremely Trump-voting parents. However, doubling the victims does not double the fun, even if Olivia O'Neill looks a lot like Linda Blair. It just means the plot is way over-stuffed with characters without space for any of them.
Speaking of over-stuffed, Ellen Burstyn is back as pure marketing gimmick. She's in The Exorcist: Believer about as long as she is in the trailers. This is utterly cynical.
That subtitle "Believer" is all about Victor's agnosticism being overturned by the emergence of the dark supernatural in his life. It is handled exactly like The Exorcism of Emily Rose only maybe worse. (I am ever the Maimonidean rationalist plus a humanist, so this shit still does not work on me.) At times, the faith-based demands of this script are so intense that this almost feels like a right-wing propaganda film. Victor's lack of faith is not a legitimate representation of moral or philosophical values, they're just lingering anger at God over his wife dying in childbirth. In this film's worldview there are no atheists in or out of foxholes, everything is really a Christian or just being spiteful against the truth. Abortion, or considering abortion, is a horrific sin. Believer is a very Pro-Life movie. A Catholic neighbor (Anne Dowd, curious casting considering Hereditary and The Handmaid's Tale) is an ex-nun whose great failure is aborted a fetus in her youth, the film leaves open no interpretation other than this was a monstrous act that ruined her standing with God. This character also delivers a long speech about how faith can overcome all - except how it can't.
The problem is that a film operating on a doctrine of "faith alone" leads to something of a thorny issue: which faith? Maybe you have lots of faith, just not in the God of Abraham. Maybe you're Jewish, maybe you belong to a kind of Christianity that other Christians believe is a heresy. The 1973 movie is a world where Catholicism is real, old fire and brimstone Catholicism too, it is not ashamed of this. The Exorcist: Believer instead pushes a compromise that "all faiths are valid", which is fine a tolerant idea. Yet that makes no sense in a black and white world where the literal Devil hangs around. If the Devil proves Catholicism is the literal truth, that means definitionally that these other faiths cannot be true, I'm sorry, these faiths are very absolutist in rejecting the others. So the final act of this film is a nondenominational Avengers team-up with Catholics fighting alongside a Southern Baptist and a Hoodoo practitioner just for good measure.
(Why no rabbi?? We Jews are not good enough to make the team?)
The other problem is that this shit doesn't work. One rule I've discovered in film exorcisms is that they almost always fail by killing the priest or the victim. The demons of Believer do not care if Vincent has faith, they are just clearly stronger. You can create a power level of faiths based on this exercise. Hoodoo is the most true religion since that almost kinda works. Protestantism has no power at all. I do not think that was what Green was going for here.
It get worse in fact. One of the girls dies, and goes to Hell, to burn for all eternity, while the movie tries to bullshit together a happy ending. Meanwhile a happy montage plays as if this was a positive ending and Ann Dowd tries to tell me that generic faith is powerful. No, movie, no. That girl was innocent and her soul is damned. Satan has broken the laws of Christian dogma, nobody is safe! I'm not going back to church or synagogue seeing this, I'm with Baphomet.
Speaking of demons, the exact villain in The Exorcist: Believer is never named. You would assume just watching the movie that this is Pazuzu again. However, online sources tell me it is meant to be Lamashtu, the other Babylonian demon I mentioned in my Exorcist 1973 review. I guess that's an idea, it is not explored. David Gordon Green intends for this new Exorcist project to be a trilogy. Maybe he'll save that girl's soul too. Count me out.
I know Universal paid $400 million(!) for the rights to The Exorcist and will want a steady run of sequels to make up their investment, I don't care. Whatever Green has in mind is not worth my time. He can imitate Freidkin sometimes, but he cannot imitate William Peter Blatty. This is a creative team with nothing interesting to say about faith. I get no sense any of these men have any faith, except the worst kind of pandering compromises. And if all you want is dumb schlock, they're not good at that either. The actual "scary" parts of Believer are much worse than the set-up. The filmmaking gets lazier the deeper it goes into demon shit. The exorcism itself is terrible. And movies fifty years ago could be edgier and more transgressive than they are today.
Also the fact this movie didn't end on a smash cut to credits playing 'I'm a Believer' by The Monkees is coward shit. Or even The Smash Mouth version. RIP Freidkin, RIP Steven Harwell.
Next Time! Luckily October has thirty-one days in it, so let's end on a movie that is actually fun. So next time we're doing Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight.
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