The Exorcist: Believer Review

The Exorcist is 50 years old and a seminal horror film, but the sequels have been a mixed bag. David Gordon Green and Blumhouse aim to repeat what they did with the Halloween series by making a direct sequel to the original film and plan to start a trilogy.

Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a widower and single father to Angela (Lidya Jewett). They have a close bond but Angela seeks to communicate with her mother. She goes off into the woods with her friend, Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) to perform a séance but they end up disappearing for three days. When they are found their behaviour has drastically changed.

Following up on The Exorcist is a big ask for any filmmaker. It’s a film that’s so important that it created the exorcism tropes that many films have followed, like The Devil Inside, Prey for the Devil, and The Pope’s Exorcist. Out of all the Exorcist sequels, only The Exorcist III has garnered a positive reception from fans and has earned a cult status.

Green did do a great job with the 2018 sequel/reboot of Halloween, but his follow-up films were poorly received. Green tried to pull the same trick with the sequel to The Exorcist since it was also a follow-up and a reboot. Halloween (2018) and The Exorcist: Believer were both repacked versions of the original story. The opening of The Exorcist: Believer shows off this repackaging, it opened with a prologue, and details were changed because it followed a couple in Haiti, but there were also obvert references like Sorenne (Tracey Graves) experiencing a pagan ritual and Victor seeing two dogs fighting.

This repackaging ended up being the film’s biggest issue. It tells the same story as the original film with the same tropes such as the wholesome parent and daughter relationship which becomes destroyed by the possession, seeing the girls undergo medical treatment, and undergoing a dangerous exorcism. The changes that were made were superficial. The idea of two girls becoming possessed felt like a hack idea from a producer thinking that was a simple idea to escalate the story. The other idea the film introduced was trying to turn the exorcism into a multi-denomination affair, but this felt like the filmmakers were trying to reinvent the wheel. The biggest story was showing the girls disappearing. It turned into a mystery like Prisoners or True Detective, especially due to the film’s small-town setting.

The Exorcist: Believer ended up being a film that needed to spell out its themes and ideas in case audiences like the girls disappearing for three days, like Jesus being dead for three days before he was resurrected. This sequence explicated states that the girls were possessed because of the séance when in the original film it was allured that Regan was possessed after using an Ouija board, but there was a sense of ambiguity. The filmmakers tried to be subversive when a character uttered the line ‘the power of Christ compels you,’ but it resulted in a groan.

The Exorcist: Believer did have some nuggets of interest. Katherine’s family was religious so it should have been extra traumatic that their daughter was possessed. However, Katherine and her family were secondary characters since the focus was on the Fieldings. There was also the idea that all religions had some form of exorcism in their constant battle between good and evil. However, the filmmakers were more focused on trying to repeat the story of the original Exorcist: they dared not be too creative.

Green can make some incredible sequences. Halloween Kills had a fight between Michael Myers and the firefighters whilst Halloween Ends had an impactful opening. The Exorcist: Believer lacked anything like that. This issue was starker because The Exorcist had some of the most iconic moments and visuals in horror history. Some of the most memorable visuals were lifted from other films. When the girls were found to have undergone a medical examination which was similar to The Accused. A scene where one of the possessed girls’ menstruates brings back bad memories of The Devil Inside.

Like many legacy sequels, The Exorcist: Believer brought back an important character from the original film. This time it was Ellen Burstyn. She played the same role as Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween (2018), the older character who had experienced unspeakable horror and was alienated from their family. Burstyn is a great actress and a model professional, and she still gives a good performance even though Chris MacNeil performed actions she wouldn’t have done in the original film. Burstyn only took the role because she used her salary to pay for an acting scholarship at Pace University.

On its terms, The Exorcist: Believer was a mediocre horror film and as a sequel to the 1973 classic it was a shameless rehash with no original ideas.