Sacrilege.
Nearly 50 years after William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” elevated the horror genre to Oscar-level greatness and produced chills and thrills that resonate with us to this day, the direct sequel “The Exorcist: Believer” is a tasteless, tacky, uninspired and just plain lousy knockoff that upchucks pea soup-colored porridge all over the legacy of the original, from the crummy-looking and tedious exorcism sequence to the murky cinematography, to the return of an iconic character who is given an absolutely awful and borderline offensive storyline. (More on that in a moment.)
Director David Gordon Green (who co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Sattler) is a talented filmmaker who did an admirable job of rescuing the “Halloween” franchise from decades of dreck with the direct sequel in 2018 that brought back Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode. The hope here was that Green would do the same with “The Exorcist,” as the sequels and prequels to date have all been mediocre at best — but “Believer” is more in keeping with Green’s “Halloween Kills” and “Halloween Ends” in that it does nothing new or original or memorable with the legacy material.
This film has double the exorcisms but about 10% of the Scare Value of the original. It’s the cinematic equivalent of your kitchen junk drawer: filled to overflowing with disparate parts, occasionally yielding something of value, but mostly just cluttered and messy. I’m not saying I was hoping to duplicate Linda Blair’s spinning-head routine from the 1973 film, but maybe a 180-degree spin, just so I’d be facing away from the screen.
In a well-filmed prologue set in 2010 Haiti, American photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is with his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) when a devastating earthquake strikes, critically injuring Sorenne and putting the baby’s life at risk. (I’m not sure it was a great idea to use a real-life tragedy that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people as the jump-starter to a pop horror film, but there we are.)
Victor is told he must decide between the life of his child or his wife — and then we cut to suburban Georgia some 13 years later and see Victor getting his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) ready for school, so we know which way things went in Haiti. Victor is an overprotective father who insists on picking up Angela after school every day and apparently limits her extracurricular activities, but he reluctantly agrees to let Angela hang with her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) for a few hours after school.
After some truly irritating editing choices and a vaguely executed sequence with the two girls in the woods, attempting to conjure the spirit of Angela’s dead mom, the girls go missing for three days before turning up in a farmhouse some 30 miles away. Oddly enough, the girls believe they’ve been missing for only a few hours; even stranger, they’re both starting to look and behave a lot like Linda Blair’s Regan did in “The Exorcist.” What we’ve got here is a good old-fashioned double possession.
Victor suddenly goes from skeptic to believer, and his quest to save Angela takes him to Chris MacNeil (the great Ellen Burstyn, looking amazing at age 90), the former actress who has become something of a renowned expert on exorcisms, much to the chagrin of her daughter Regan, who disappeared years ago and hasn’t been heard from since. The effort to crowbar Chris into the storyline here is arbitrary and forced — and while I won’t spoil what happens to Chris, let’s just say it feels cheap and exploitative.
The build-up to the dual exorcism is so terrible it’s almost funny, as Victor assembles a team of Avenging Rookie Exorcists that includes Katherine’s evangelical parents (Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer Nettles) and their pastor (Raphael Sbarge); a root doctor (Okwui Okpokwasili) who believes in the power of vinegar and drawing circles on the floor of Victor’s house, and a couple of conveniently located neighbors: a former novitiate nun turned nurse (Ann Dowd) and a Pentecostal preacher (Danny McCarthy). There’s even a Catholic priest (E.J. Bonilla) who decides at the last minute to join the party, even though the Church has recommended the families try therapy in lieu of an exorcism.
With the two young actors playing Angela and Katherine sporting makeup that has them looking like the Nieces of Chucky while they say bad things in the obligatory devil’s voices, “The Exorcist: Believer” drags on and on before mercifully ending with a couple of twists — one that feels particularly unearned. Completing the trip to mediocrity, the version of “Tubular Bells” we hear on the soundtrack sounds like it’s from the Yacht Rock playlist, heaven help us.
