It’s hard to try and make a new movie in a long-standing and beloved franchise. Especially when the first movie is a classic, and especially in the horror genre. Then you have something like The Exorcist, a film from 1973 that really is beyond just a horror film, and that’s not putting the genre down but just admitting that film transcended most of the films from that year and that decade. Yet, see, here’s the problem – they kept making more films to follow it and prequels and even a television show. None of these were as good as that first film. I can’t talk about the other novels made after the first one that was the basis for the first film, but the movies, while there are a limited few that are okay but they, aren’t breaking into the “high cinema” heights. That brings us to David Gordon Green, who is just coming off doing a new Halloween trilogy connected to the first film from the late 70s. He now has his sights on The Exorcist and, like the former movies, connects this – The Exorcist: Believer to the first film.
Directed by David Gordon Green and put out by Blumhouse, the story of this film focuses mainly on Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.), a man who lost his pregnant wife during the earthquake in Haiti. The baby was saved, and he raised her on his own. One day, his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) disappears with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) in the woods after school one day. Victor and Katherine’s parents, Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz), search for their daughters. Once they find them, they have to deal with their daughters’ strange behavior. Katherine’s parents look to faith, but Victor, who has lost his faith, looks toward someone who has been through something similar before – Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the mother of Regan MacNeil, the girl who was possessed in the original film.
Now I think this film is decent. It’s not great or even close to the level of the old movie, but it’s not as bad as I’ve seen some others say. Maybe I just have a better memory of some of these other Exorcist movies over the years. I like Odom Jr.’s performance here as he plays it seriously; he doesn’t phone it in at all—his relationship with Jewett as his daughter worked for me. Much of the other characters do feel pretty flat, except for Burstyn’s Chris. The makeup on the girls was good, along with the lighting on making the girls look possessed, similar to how Linda Blair looked in the 70s film. The thing that stood out to me is that this film felt almost like those Christian religious films that they put out over certain holidays like Easter and Christmas. I didn’t expect so much Christian ideology while also trying to make it more inclusive to other belief systems; the most shown is HooDoo/Voudoo (I apologize if I’m spelling this wrong) as a key form of facing a devil possession but only for the Black characters for the most part. The movie tries to have its cake and eat it too and also uses the character of Ann (Ann Dowd), a nurse and Victor’s neighbor who is introduced as Karen but is a nurse who through her faith, is Victor’s main ally in saving his daughter but also a weird tool of shame for her past from herself and the devils that feel like validating Christian fundamentalist ideology some glaring ways. Those things did had me feeling some type of way, but I do feel that the movie is alright overall, and I don’t think it’s horrible. Its primary sin is mediocrity.
Score: C
RIOTUS 