This week saw the Paramount+ streaming release of the last movie by the late great William Friedkin. And by all accounts, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is a fitting swansong for the New Hollywood maverick, clever and intense and highly singular. But in an ironic twist of fate it’s drowned out almost entirely in the movie discourse this weekend by a dull reboot of one of the iconic films that made Friedkin famous.
Fifty years later The Exorcist is still one of the greatest horror films ever made -it’s just as intense, compelling, rich and shocking now as it was when first released. The Exorcist: Believer is none of those things -merely the next classic horror property Blumhouse got the rights to and gave to David Gordon Green to make them a quick buck after he had finished his Halloween trilogy. And Green approaches it the exact same way he did those Halloween movies -by making a direct sequel to the original film that pays shallow homage and is stripped of any real character or artistic ingenuity in favour of mundane horror tropes. But Halloween frankly, being a bloated franchise where so many instalments are interchangeable, doesn’t ask for much more than some fairly strong slasher movie beats -hence why that first instalment of Green’s was actually alright. The Exorcist however, does demand something more substantive, something more distinct. And Green isn’t a filmmaker much capable of either of those things.
Like his first Halloween and unlike any of the prior Exorcist sequels, this movie is a fairly straight re-tread of the plot and themes of the first film -in that once again it centres on a child, or in this case two children, who are possessed by a demon; forcing the parent to confront the supernatural and seek out an exorcism. Here that role is played by Leslie Odom Jr. as Victor, a photographer and single dad whose wife had survived the 2010 Haitian earthquake just long enough for their daughter to be born. Seeking to connect with her late mother by any means, the young Angela (Lidya Jewett) goes off one day with Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), the daughter of a couple of devout Baptists to attempt some kind of a ritual -the pair turning up three days later possessed by demons. In seeking a way to exorcise the children, the religiously cynical Victor doesn’t look for a priest, though he does eventually turn to renowned exorcism expert Chris MacNeil -a reprisal from Ellen Burstyn that she took to fund a scholarship program at Pace University.
Noble on her part, but it doesn’t make her participation in this movie any less shallow -Green aiming to give her the kind of focus he brought for Jamie Lee Curtis in his Halloween movies, which not only requires neglecting the effects of the original movie on Chris (why she would become an expert in a thing that so traumatized her and her daughter -and which this film acknowledges created a decades-spanning rift between the two), but doesn’t play particularly well to Burstyn’s strengths as an actress. At some point in the process perhaps Green realized this, leaving her alone for most of the third act (she’s introduced in the second), but it still feels nothing short of obligatory in spite of one great scene Burstyn is allowed to have. Nonetheless, she’s generally more engaging than just about anybody else on screen.
Odom pretty much treads water as a character who ought to be interesting given his experiences, and especially given one detail that comes up far too late in the film, but he’s largely the hollow rational but concerned father figure. The other pair of parents, played by Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz are typical religious parent archetypes, straight-laced and disciplined and a tiny bit implicitly bigoted. Each of the kids do a fine job essentially mimicking Linda Blair’s performance from 1973, aided by some good digital and make-up effects and modulated voices, but there’s nothing unique or interesting to them. And in the absence of actual priests fulfilling a key role in the spiritual themes at play and the connection between exorcism and Catholicism, the movie features a bored Ann Dowd as a nurse whose religious character is undeveloped and platitudinous.
In fact, by and large Green’s choice to sidestep the role of the church and the clergy in this film is one of its biggest sources of deficiency. I understand the impetus not to risk framing the church in a positive light, its clergy as heroic in a modern and mainstream secular movie; but it is a necessary facet of the Exorcist brand -for lack of a better word. The curious perspective on religion offered by that first movie at the very least gave it a wealth of personality -it was interested in the interior lives and struggles of priests as much as the ‘heathen’ Hollywood actress. Here, those same characters are merely made a mockery of -the “Exorcist” of the title referring to a collective (including a few characters only barely known to the audience) who come together to rid the demons, and Victor more specifically, who must come to believe in demonic possession.
The effect of the exorcism is diluted by this, the stakes diminished -in spite of the movie’s desperation that they be high. And everything surrounding that climax is much too familiar -a collection of bits from the original movie that Green could still get away with today: the creases and scars on the bodies, chanting references to Hell and Satanism, projectile-vomiting black bile… though nothing approaching the heavy sacrilege, still shocking sexual references and profanity of the original. Basically, anything that would make audiences uncomfortable or make the movie itself stand out has been scrubbed away, and it’s no surprise that this hardly yields any good horror. As his Halloween movies proved, Green is not a particularly inventive director when it comes to crafting scary moments and creeping moods. The best he can summon here are a couple uninspired jump scare fake-outs, and he doesn’t seem to realize simply carrying over narrative devices and visual aesthetics from a far superior film isn’t enough. Even a glimpse into the realm of the possession itself pales in comparison to Talk to Me. At the end of the day, this is a movie without even one effective horror beat that I can think of.
I will say the choice Green went with in the end is a good one, and the closest to anything resembling a risk in this movie -even if it too is only dimly executed. And it’s still not nearly smart enough to justify the movie’s interminable dullness. The Exorcist: Believer was again put out by Blumhouse, who are of course famous for making movies on tight budgets that can be fairly easy to make a profit off of. And that cheapness approach works for some movies designed to its parameters, like The Black Phone or this year’s own M3GAN -even the Halloween franchise. But applying that small-scale approach to The Exorcist, reducing it to just another muted horror episode against a backdrop of middle-American suburbia, feels a little insulting and a lot like a colossal waste.
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