The Exorcist: Believer Review
Theatrical Movie Review - Horror
My mom worked at a nursing home when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time with her there. People often donated books, and I would pick through the leftovers and take whatever looked interesting, which is how, as a middle schooler, I stumbled on a copy of William Peter Blatty’s novel, “The Exorcist.” I saw the movie much later and was amazed to discover just how much of the novel William Friedkin included in the film, making it one of the gold standards for possession movies. Trailers for David Gordon Green’s “The Exorcist: Believer” looked like a return to what made the original so good.
Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a single dad raising his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett). When Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) go missing for three days and show up with changed personalities, Victor’s neighbor Ann (Ann Dowd) points him to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Bustyn), a woman who had been through a similar situation with her daughter. Employing the help of Katherine’s parents Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz),Victor gathers various faith leaders to help save the girls.
It felt like there was a lot of squandered potential in this movie. While it definitely employs some jump scares, it doesn’t rely on them, and there were some truly creepy moments. But where the original had escalating body horror, this movie never leaned into that. Instead it tried to delve into emotional trauma, but without ever fully examining that.
Overall, the performances were good. Dowd remains one of my favorite character actors and she was great, as always. Odom, Jr. was solid. Both of the girls were good and played their possession well. Burstyn felt a bit too melodramatic in her scenes, but generally speaking, I thought the cast put in the work.
The story, on the other hand, fell apart for me in the third act. The buildup to it was sufficiently disturbing, but when it came time for the actual exorcism, I thought the whole thing fell apart. At one point, Bustyn’s character gives a very clear thesis statement and then that was ignored in the final scene.
Horror movies tend to be formulaic, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The formula exists because it works. Sometimes writers and directors will play with the formula or ignore it altogether and if the story and the performances are strong enough, it can produce something interesting and good. This movie felt like it wanted to shake things up at the end, but it ended up feeling messy.
Genre defining movies are always tough to follow, even fifty years later. “The Exorcist: Believer” makes a better attempt than some of its predecessors, but at the end of the day, it was unable to make a believer out of me.