David Gordon Green somewhat makes sense as a director of updated, ostensibly truer-to-the-spirit-of-the-original remakes of horror films. He’s clearly a huge horror fan. He and Danny McBride’s collaborations on several Halloween films gives off the impression that they’re really passionate about the franchises and want to make something original. And Green’s direction, if not especially striking or idiosyncratic, is fairly robust and kinetic, definitely inspired by 70s New Hollywood filmmaking. The names behind it feel right, but the results vary greatly.
Green had more luck with the Halloween movies. While their scripts suffered from numerous issues, the direction generally suited the films. They feel like Halloween movies. The Exorcist: Believer is both poorly scripted and also does not feel meaningfully connected to William Friedkin’s original film or William Peter Blatty’s book. It’s entirely a run-of-the-mill possession movie with the Exorcist name and stars attached. For all their faults, Green’s Halloween films still had this sort of atmosphere and tone that reminded people of John Carpenter’s original, and so they stay afloat on that, for lack of a better word, clout. The Exorcist: Believer has no such life-preserver.
To its credit, the film starts out pretty well. The beginning takes place in Haiti right before the 2010 earthquake (no, there’s no cool Haitian folklore involved in the rest of the movie if you were wondering). In a very well done, thrilling sequence, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and his heavily pregnant wife, Sorenne (Tracey Graves) narrowly escape their crumbling apartment building, but Sorenne’s injuries are too great to save both her and the baby. Flash forward thirteen years and Victor is now a single father to Angela (Lydia Jewett), a bright and slightly precocious young teen who makes the mistake of trying to contact the other side (sound familiar?)
By far the biggest problem with The Exorcist: Believer is its rushed pace. The original Exorcist saw Regan’s possession occur slowly, beginning like general teen angst and evolving into full on psychotic behavior and finally a supernatural takeover. In this film, Angela and her friend Katherine go into some woods, dangle a jewel around, and come out more or less demoniacal, weird facial scarring, potty mouths and all. Possession theatrics make up the bulk of the scares, though without being improved upon or done in some kind of novel manner. They’re perfunctory, unimaginative, and frankly annoying. Other events in the script, mostly the ones pertaining to Victor working with Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), feel absolutely pointless and almost hilariously misguided in their outrageousness.
Most befuddling, though, were the attempts at expressing some kind of spiritual or religious point of view. There seems to be an attempt to grapple with the fact that all possession films are, in a sense, pro-Catholic. In fact, The Exorcist, the quintessential Catholic Exorcism film, may be one of the only ones in the genre to have a nuanced view of the matter. William Friedkin, who was Jewish, had the least Catholic view of all, entertaining the idea that the film may be ambiguous in terms of whether or not the exorcism was really a success or just smoke and mirrors that still led to someone’s death.
The Exorcist: Believer seems to think that, yes, we need Catholic exorcism to fight demons, that atheists are mad at God and need to get past their cynicism, and that demons know when you got an abortion and will bully you about it. I don’t really think these are views the filmmakers meant to espouse, but in so directly addressing the religious aspects without really interrogating them, the film ends up being disconcertingly regressive. One thing that almost bolsters this aspect into something interesting (although not quite), is the fact that Katherine’s family comes from an evangelical church, and their insular and individualistic approach to faith (not to mention the right-leaning sensibilities that most audiences will simply assume they have based on their coding) becomes a major detriment to them. There’s something in there about the value of faith as a facilitator of communal action and support as opposed to blind adherence to doctrine, but the point gets lost in all the noisy, tropey nonsense.
Of course no film is safe from being franchised, but The Exorcist really is one of the least franchisable films in the major pantheon of horror films. There’s a very stark, bleak finality to it. There’s no real victory, just a sobering even break that leaves nothing but an incessant existential dread behind. The Exorcist: Believer leaves bad feelings behind, too, but not the good bad feelings. | Nic Champion
