Say what you will about the sequels that William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-seller The Exorcist has gone on to inspire over the past half-century since its release—and many have, usually in terms that are borderline Satanic in their profanity—they were, for the most part, not simply lazy rehashes of the same stuff that knocked audiences for a loop back in 1973. Instead, John Boorman’s rococo Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), William Peter Blatty’s creepy/crazy The Exorcist III (1990) and Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) were crazily ambitious works that attempted to give audiences new and unexpected experiences (perhaps too much so for their tastes, to judge by audience reactions) and even the one that didn’t work, Exorcist: The Beginning, Renny Harlin’s 2004 reworking of Schrader’s project following him being fired by the producers (mostly for the crime of essentially giving them a Paul Schrader film), at least tried to do something different. Like most of those who came before him, David Gordon Green is clearly no slouch as a filmmaker—though those who know him primarily from his dreadful three-part resurrection of the Halloween franchise and not the indie gems from earlier in his career feel otherwise—but with The Exorcist: Believer, the start of what is reported to be a three-part continuation of the saga, he has delivered what is unquestionably the low point in the checkered history of the series, an often-baffling and thoroughly uninteresting retread of the original lacking any of that film’s tension, surprise or core competence.
Before you accuse me of being nothing more than an old fart fanboy unwilling to accept a new take on an old favorite, I should mention that the Friedkin original is one of those films that has never quite clicked with me. Mind you, I consider it to be an excellent film on many levels—it treats potential silly material with a refreshing seriousness, the performances are all solid and it is an work of impeccable technical craftsmanship. However, it has always struck me as a film that requires an audience that truly believes in the ideas about good, evil, Heaven and Hell for it to have its strongest impact and as a lapsed Lutheran (and already technically a heretic), it has never had the power over me that it obviously has had over so many others throughout the decades. It is a film that I do admire to at least some degree but I will state that not only are there many Friedkin works that I would put above, there are Exorcist sequels that are better as well—the Boorman film is a stone-cold classic and this is a hill that I am willing to fall upon.
Using the same approach as he did with his Halloween sequels—retconning everything following the original film out of existence—the film opens in Haiti in 2010 as photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is forced to make an impossible choice between the life of his pregnant wife or unborn daughter in the wake of a cataclysmic earthquake. Thirteen years later, the widowed Victor is living in a small town in Georgia and raising his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett) when one day, she and bestie Katherine (Olivia Marcum), walk off into the woods after school in order to perform a ritual that will hopefully let her contact the mother she never knew. The girls don’t return home and Victor and Katherine’s more overtly devout parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) frantically search for them until they inexplicably turn up three days with some painful injuries and no idea of how long they were gone or what happened during their absence.
Of course, it is no spoiler to state that the girls brought something else back with them and before too long, it becomes apparent that something is seriously wrong with them and while Victor tries to find some logical reason to explain everything, it is Ann (Ann Dowd)—who, in a miracle of narrative shorthand, is revealed to be Victor’s next-door neighbor, a nurse at the hospital where the girls are staying and a former novice who dropped out before taking her final vows—who recognizes the signs of demonic possession (though it would be hard not to notice them at this point) and passes on to him a book on the subject of possessed kids that she read in college written by Chris MacNeil. Yes, that Chris MacNeil, played—in her return to the franchise for the first time since the original—by none other than Ellen Burstyn herself. Although the book brought her nothing but grief—she no longer sees or speaks to daughter Regan since its publication—she agrees to help try to rescue the girls and when the Catholic Church drops the ball (seems they are more into therapy these days), it is left to a multi-denominational group of people in Victor’s life who bring their respective belief systems into play in the hopes of casting the two demons out.
As bad as The Exorcist: Believer is—and it is very bad—I must confess that for about the first 20 minutes or so, it seemed as if the film might actually turn out to be something worthwhile after all. As Green sets the scene for the story to come, there are genuine glimmers that—unlike the Halloween debacles—suggest what might result if he applied the unique storytelling skills he demonstrated in early works like George Washington and Snow Angels to the horror genre. Alas, once the girls return home and start displaying their increasingly odd behavior, the film becomes just another knockoff of the original that is long on replicating the elements that worked the first time around to unnerve audiences—spinning heads, near-subliminal flashes of unsettling imagery, “Tubular Bells” on the soundtrack (albeit in a form less fearsome and more jazzy than before)—and short on anything new and disturbing. There is a potentially intriguing idea in having the near-secular multi-faith group replacing the usual Catholic priests but Green and co-writer Peter Sattler pretty much piss it away for some soft-hearted pablum about people of all backgrounds uniting for the common good that doesn’t quite sit so well amidst all the blood, vomit and alternate fluids.
Even when the film isn’t explicitly copying the original, it never finds a way out from under its still-considerable shadow. Friedkin’s film pushed so many buttons and defied so many taboos that it still has the power to raise hackles in those encountering it for the first time. The problem is that this leaves Green facing a choice as impossible as Victor’s—go the same path as the likes of Boorman and Schrader and do something new and unexpected or figure out a way to top what Friedkin did all those years ago. Needless to say, he takes the second path and needless to say, it never works. Everyone still recalls Regan in the original rasping out “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell” to Father Kara’s (Jason Miller) as a particularly jolting moment. Here, the film tries to replicate that moment with a scene in which Katherine freaks out in the middle of a church service with her family, stumbling in covered in communion wine while yelling “The body and the blood” while the pastor (Raphael Sbarge. . . yes, Raphael Sbarge) and the congregation look mildly taken aback. Not quite the same thing, is it? (Hell, in my own church-going days, I experienced more raw terror each week at the point in the service when the pastor would pause for use to turn around and greet the people sitting near us in the name of fellowship.)
Perhaps inevitably, the most disappointing aspect of The Exorcist: Believer is the one that was presumably meant to give it more legitimacy than its predecessors—the return to the franchise of Ellen Burstyn, who has long spit the bit on appearing in earlier sequels and who I hope received buckets of cash for her turn here. While her initial appearance does bring about the closest that the film ever gets to a genuine sense of frisson, that quickly wears away once it becomes apparent that he sees her more as a prop than anything else. Those expecting her to take center stage once again in the way that Jamie Lee Curtis did in the Halloween sequels will be vexed to discover that her much-ballyhooed performance turns out to be little more than a cameo. On one level, I can sort of understand this—at the risk of sounding indelicate, you don’t necessarily want to base the narrative of three films—two of which have yet to even be made—entirely around the presence of an actor who is currently 90 years old. That said, if you are going to go through the trouble to bring the likes of Burstyn back into the fold, you should give her something to do and certainly something less mortifying than what she gets to endure here.
The problem with The Exorcist: Believer is not that it isn’t a better film than the original—even I would concede that few movies in the genre are as skillfully done as that one, though I would still push you in the direction of The Heretic. The real problem is that it never even tries to do anything to live up to the legacy of its predecessor. This is nothing more than another half-assed attempt at reviving a familiar IP that exists only to score a big weekend or two at the box-office before the word that it sucks gets around. It may well accomplish that—though perhaps not quite as much with the imminent arrival of the Taylor Swift concert film, a power that even Satan cannot begin to overcome—but even if it does, it is unlikely that many people are even going to remember its existence by the time the Thanksgiving dishes have been cleared from the table. Maybe if we all pray, perhaps David Gordon Green will elect to get all of this franchise nonsense behind him and return to the kind of projects that once earmarked him as the future of filmmaking rather than a raider and despoiler of the glories of other. Either that or pray that someone else decides to take on the franchise at some point down the line and retcons this one out of existence as well.