The Exorcist: Believer – Film Review
After rebooting the Halloween franchise with a new trilogy, David Gordon Green and his team have moved on to another iconic horror series with The Exorcist, with The Exorcist: Believer set to be the first of three.
The film, a direct sequel to the 1973 original, tells the story of Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia Marcum), two teenage girls who perform a ritual in the woods and go missing. They show up three days later with no recollection of what happened to them – and wherever they’ve been, they definitely brought something back with them. Angela’s father Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) tracks down Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) – whose daughter Regan was possessed in the original – to help save the girls.
The Exorcist was a game-changing, trailblazing horror when it came out and it still holds up today. It is a fantastic movie and remains, in my eyes, the gold standard for demon possession movies. In the ensuing 50 years, we have seen many possession and/or exorcism movies and while some have been good, they don’t hold a candle to William Friedkin‘s landmark original.
It was always going to be difficult for The Exorcist: Believer to live up to that legacy so it’s not a massive shocker to state that it does not manage to do so. It has some brilliantly horrifying moments but it just felt hollow and like we’d seen it all before – because we have. It also doesn’t make the most of its legacy character Chris, the only true tangible connective tissue to the original. I get that they want to start fresh with a new cast but Chris was tragically underused.
Don’t get me wrong, there were some decent scares. I was filled with dread when the girls returned home because I was waiting for something to happen and I jumped a couple of times. The progressively scary make-up on the girls is grotesque and horrifying and there are some clever practical effects, which are most clearly on display during the gripping finale. It is bloody and gruesome at times, with a couple of savage body horror moments, but it could have gone even further.
Odom Jr. is a solid lead who grounds the story with his deep connection to his daughter and both girls are suitably terrifying in very physically demanding roles. But the star of the show was Ann Dowd as Victor’s neighbour, who happens to be both a nurse and a woman of faith.
I was really impressed with Green’s Halloween reboot and gave it 5/5 (let’s forget about the following two). He unfortunately doesn’t have similar success with The Exorcist: Believer, which tries to recapture the magic of the original but inevitably falls short.
In cinemas from Friday 6th October