The Exorcist: Believer review - awful in the most obvious way
Director: David Gordon Green
Writers: Peter Sattler and David Gordon Green
Stars: Leslie Odom Jr., Lidya Jewett, and Olivia O’Neill
Running Time: 111 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below.
With the atrocious The Exorcist: Believer in theaters, David Gordon Green has reminded us of something that has been clear for decades: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is not a franchise-able horror property. And the reason is because The Exorcist (1973) isn’t a horror movie, it’s a mystery.
It’s a shame Universal Pictures weren’t told this before they paid $400 million for the rights to a new trilogy of films. And it’s not like many haven’t tried before. John Boorman, Paul Schrader, and even William Peter Blatty, the original novelist himself, have produced work within this attempted franchise ranging from awful to adequate. Green’s latest work is a fascinating example of the limitations of sequels, of what happens when you hit the iconographic boundaries of a property and fail miserably to move beyond them.
I call out Green as fascinating because he’s already done this previously with Blumhouse Productions to reboot the Halloween franchise between 2018 and 2022. Here we have filmmaker acutely aware of the issues surrounding making a movie in a minefield – making the same movie again but doing it differently enough to engender a new audience. When the deal was packaged along with Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. and the returning Ellen Burstyn, it’s easy to see why on paper this endeavor was attractive. Burstyn returning adds much needed legitimacy to a project desperate for it. Similar to what hiring Jamie Lee Curtis did for Halloween (2018), Green’s strategy to bring Burstyn back to play Chris MacNeil felt like a real boon for the project. What Universal didn’t anticipate was Leslie Odom Jr being void of charisma and Burstyn’s contribution being so poorly written, it’s unintentionally comedic.
It's a shame – Odom Jr is clearly talented, but it’s impossible to say how misdirected he is. The writing does him no favors in the first act where his role is to emotionally connect us to the impeding doom. In an uninspiring first sequence based in Haiti, an earthquake that kills his wife is both dramatically inert and visually drab. Where there should be visual spark and creativity is reduced to a shaky-cam television pilot from the early 2000s. Whilst Burstyn and Linda Blair in the first movie feel related and authentic, Odom Jr and his daughter co-star Lidya Jewett feel too performative, too earnest and sparky to have the lived-in feeling of a real family.
Burstyn’s extended cameo is not good. I love Ellen Burstyn, but she’s carrying too much flimsy film logic on her back. Her even being here is hard to justify. She’s granted a sort-of citizen performs exorcism scene (apparently called a deliverance ritual) and is quickly reduced to a blind hospital patient, who Green is keen to cut to when the A-plot becomes too dull. According to Green, when he first approached Burstyn for the role, she hesitated but Green talked her into it by sharing his intentions. In a more believable story, Burstyn said after they doubled her offer, “I thought, That’s a lot of money. Let me think about it.” It seems cash is louder than words.
Good on her for taking the money, for upon watching the film, it’s clear she didn’t take the job for the material. Unlike Halloween, The Exorcist’s success in 1973 was its documentary-esque sense of authenticity. Halloween’s conventions are so clearly defined – it created the golden age of the slasher movie genre. The conventions for a Halloween story are infinitely repeatable in different locations with different characters because the bogeyman is a universal idea. Green was clearly inspired by the task, as Halloween (2018) is a jugular slicing experience. Fast, tightly edited and with Jamie Lee Curtis reversing her role from victim to killer, it adds fresh ideas to an often stale formula. Most importantly, Green understands what the Halloween franchise is and why it works.
But The Exorcist: Believer fundamentally misunderstands what keeps The Exorcist (1973) riveting – it’s a mystery. Both The Exorcist (1973) and it’s cousin The Omen (1976) work because they are about characters searching for answers to a mystery. Chris MacNeill is searching for the one person who can explain why her daughter is behaving like the devil himself, whilst her acquaintance Father Karras is searching for proof of real demonic possession. This central mystery is what makes Regan talking backwards so exciting, it’s why we feel goosebumps when Karras sits alone listening to his audio recordings. All of these detective elements excel because the film isn’t showing you all its cards – it’s hasn’t confirmed for you that this is actually a supernatural issue.
And now many lacklustre sequels later, there is no mystery. We already know the supernatural exists in this universe. And so we’re robbed of the element of mystery, the element of ambiguity Friedkin loved to play with. With the franchise stripped of mystery and ambiguity, we’re sadly left with a film that doesn’t realize its most successful component has already been spoiled.
According to David Gorden Green, he would have loved to show his take on The Exorcist to William Friedkin, who sadly died in August 2023. Friedkin would probably have reminded Green and Hollywood once again that The Exorcist is a film, not a franchise.
