The Exorcist: Believer – Review

I’m a defender of David Gordon Green’s trilogy of Halloween sequels. I had a blast with the first one, found the second fun but pretty lacking, but found redemption as the third one genuinely tried something new with the franchise. Just because that worked out doesn’t mean I thought a trilogy of sequels to The Exorcist would have worked the same way. It’s a different type of story, one that is deeply saturated in conservative faith and genuine fear of anything unheavenly. For a non-believer, it’s a fun and freaky time but for the genuine believer, this seems to be the one horror franchise that is genuinely made with them in mind. This was a mismatch of director and material from the start and the final product achieves what no other film in the franchise has pulled off before.

It’s boring.

While a plethora of iffy exorcism films come out during any given year (The Pope’s Exorcist and Prey for the Devil this year alone) they at least manage to be silly fun. The Exorcist: Believer commits a lot of sins and I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be anything near its predecessor but good lord (joke intended). It’s self-serious, is tone-deaf enough to utilize a very real recent tragedy as a storytelling device, and takes an upsettingly backward stance against modern gender politics in a way that’s going to cause such an orgasm through militantly Christian America. Making it boring on top of all these things is just depressing.

Our obsession with legacy characters is bizarre, ain’t it? Star Wars stories now require nostalgia, horror to its detriment must acknowledge characters from the first films (lookin’ at you, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022), and now we’re dragging ninty-year-old Ellen Burstyn out to reprise a character that isn’t exactly key to this franchise. The fact that they aggressively attack her and then shove her to the side within mere minutes is an eye-roll comparable to the military jerking-off fests of Michael Bay films.

I was honestly disgusted with the use of the 2010 Haitian earthquake as a plot point. This very real tragedy that resulted in the deaths of 160,000 people (most likely more, this is just the official number) being used to launch a feature-length anti-abortion narrative is just plain vile. I’m beyond disappointed that Camp X-Ray writer Peter Sattler churned this out with Green. Hell, Scott Teems was the third co-writer and I can’t feel his beautifully schlocky fingerprints on this thing at all. Instead, it’s bizarre that this tragedy, which occurred in the same year that Allen Couleter’s Remember Me co-opted the 9/11 tragedy for emotional manipulation, tries to co-opt another culture’s suffering to weave a narrative to please your relative that spends way too much time engaging with conspiracy theories on Facebook.

There are so many interesting ideas that it’s a shame The Exorcist: Believer isn’t more successful. Leslie Odom Jr. as a man who has lost his faith, confronted with the devil (it’s not even Pazuzu), could work as a new way to view this. Okwui Okpokwasili as a Hoodoo healer that participates in this exorcism, widening the scope beyond Catholicism to other cultures, is an incredible idea that goes nowhere. Hell, just having a Pentecostal preacher (Danny McCarthy) and a Catholic priest (E.J. Bonilla) in the same room to support each other in an exorcism is interesting. So why is this so bland?

I don’t think this is really all David Gordon Green’s fault. I think Blumhouse looked at the success of his Halloween movies and backed a dump truck full of money up to his house. It failed spectacularly but I have to hope that they will take the right lessons and move forward in a better direction. The Exorcist: Deceiver is already in development. Green’s involvement is up in the air but I really do think there’s a way to save this. Sadly, this standalone film just doesn’t work and contains some incredibly insensitive and willfully ignorant material.

The Exorcist: Believer is playing in theatres. Do what you will.