Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) is raising his teenage daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), after his wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) died in the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.  When Angela and Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), another girl from school, go missing, the town is in a panic until they are found a few days later taking shelter in an outbuilding of a farm.  Relieved to have their girls safe at home, Victor, along with Katherine’s devout parents, Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz), begin to worry about the strange and violent behaviors that have overcome their girls.  Without much help from doctors, they turn to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), who has spent her life studying the rites of exorcism across cultures after her own daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), was possessed years ago, to try and cleanse the souls of their daughters and truly bring them back home through an exorcism. 

From Blumhouse and Universal Studios comes the latest legacy sequel of an iconic property as David Gordon Green was handed the reigns to William Friedkin’s seminal entry, The Exorcist (1973). Resurrecting the franchise after an 18-year hiatus with his vision, The Exorcist: Believer is part one of a proposed two-part entry with The Exorcist: Deceiver slated for release in 2025.  After Green released the well-received Halloween (2018) – his legacy sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic – Universal wanted to corner the market of legacy horror sequels and spent a reported $400 million on the rights to The Exorcist. After the swell of negative reactions from Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), why they kept Green attached is a mystery possibly only solved by some fine print in contracts.  He and Peter Sattler write the script for this 111-minute, wet blanket of a thriller, and while they seek to pay homage to Friedkin’s work at any opportunity, they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why and how the original has become such a touchstone for audiences as they approach their film as just another commercialized modern horror movie. 

It is both impossible and profoundly unfair to weigh Green’s work against Friedkin’s, but he brings these comparisons upon himself from the title, to the inclusion of Tubular Bells in Amman Abbasi and David Wingo’s score, and the various elements that are lifted from Regan’s possession; but to be generous to Green et al, these comparisons will not be addressed here so that Believer has a chance to also be evaluated on its own merits.  Simply put, Green offers nothing new to audiences here, and because the elements of Friedkin’s work are so shoddily stitched in, it is hard to honestly tell if their inclusion is out of respect or contempt.  Without getting too in the weeds about how the exorcism is just calling back to elements of the original much in the same way that JJ Abrams when taking over a franchise, is unable to craft an original third act and instead peddles in nostalgic references, the most egregious example of Green’s lack of care around the source is how Believer handles Burstyn.  Introduced at about the halfway mark, she delivers long monologues about how in every culture and every faith there is some form of an exorcism ritual before she agrees to go with Victor to see the girls.  It is set up much like Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was set up in Halloween (2018), but then the film takes a shocking left turn in one of the only bold moves in the film, only to slowly walk back its implications and again saddle Burstyn with, this time, a written-in-post monologue about the power of prayer.  To give Green the benefit of the doubt here as a writer-director, that such a thematic moment is delivered through ADR means his original vision was probably heavily influenced by studio notes from execs looking to make good on their investment, but if they are not going to trust Green to deliver his vision either good or bad, it is no surprise that the result is just a muddy, unfocused mess. While horror, in that which makes us scared, tends to be universal, it is in the unique representation and manifestation of those fears that make a film impactful and though Green’s vision may not have been great, the clear studio interference certainly does not help him achieve anything of note.   

Believer, however, starts off by laying some interesting groundwork, albeit folding the Haitian earthquake tragedy into a springboard for character trauma is still in poor taste, further complicated by making Victor decide if they will perform a lifesaving abortion on Sorenne or focus their efforts on inducing delivery.  When the film jumps ahead thirteen years, Green places Victor in another impossible situation with a missing child.  Narratively, it is some of the scariest moments of the film as Victor is frantically looking for Angela while also butting heads with the equally frantic Miranda and Tony as they search for Katherine.  Green compiles a B roll of nerve-wracking atmospheric elements for Timothy Alverson to edit together, and while it works on paper, in practice it is more aggravating than anything as instead of building up a truly terrifying story the film relies more on assaulting audiences with jackhammers, swerving traffic, and blaring car horns.  Once the girls are found, he again prompts Alverson to cut excessively between the two waiting rooms, and again it is something that works well on paper, but Green seems to be employing trauma for trauma’s sake without regard for what he is doing.  After trivializing a natural disaster and the decision to undergo a lifesaving abortion, Green seems perfectly content to subject Angela and Katherine to a comprehensive physical exam complete with a rape kit, yet none of this ever seems to truly affect or change these characters; children or parents.  The tests all come back clear, but that their children needed to go through this all is something that should be reckoned with but is not. It is all there to make the audience uncomfortable, but because it has such little substance, these major moments feel about as cheap as the jump scares which Green will also rely on heavily throughout the film. 

The middle act is mostly treading water as it tries to retrofit Chris into this new installment, but it does transition to a third act with a bit of promise.  Slowly but surely, Green had been preparing for a showdown between the as-of-yet-unnamed Pazuzu against all walks of faith.  He brings together Victor’s atheism, neighbor Ann’s (Ann Dowd) Catholicism, and Dr. Beehibe’s (Okwui Okpokwasili) root work, but casts a bit too wide of a net in incorporating the new age faith of Tony and Miranda.  Their faith leaders, Don (Raphael Sbarge) and Stuart (Danny McCarthy), just get in the way with their boisterous prayers, even so much so that Pazuzu mocks them.  There is a lot of narrative interest, though, in how Ann and Beehibe confront the exorcism and even though their rites vary greatly, it is very interesting to see what they share in common.  Unfortunately, Green’s film is not truly interested in examining why all of our cultures throughout time have had some instance of a devil and a regimented ritual to remove the devil when a person succumbs to them and instead peddles in the tropes of the genre, which, to be fair, Friedkin was heavily responsible for establishing and while modern CGI and VFX may help makes these sequences larger and more violent or over the top, few if any directors have managed to show us something concretely new in an exorcism in the 50 years since Pazuzu first terrified audiences. 

Looking at The Exorcist: Believer on its own, it is an uninspired entry into the horror genre, and though it does set up some interesting strings in the first and third acts, it sidesteps that payoff for it to come full circle in Deceiver.  Odom Jr. does what he can with a rigidly written role as the leading man, but thankfully Dowd comes in and really takes control of the narrative, elevating the stakes with a deeper connection to the themes of the film.  Her work, however, is unable to make sense of the nonexistent grounding logic of the film so her motivations are difficult to track and it just gets harder from there as the bloated ensemble is poorly managed The biggest issue with exorcism films is that there needs to be a connection forged between audiences and the victim, and while Friedkin also struggled at times in his film to build that bridge with Regan, Green seemingly does not even try here.  Jewett and O’Neill similarly do what they can, but Jewett’s Angela is messily written, and O’Neill’s Katherine is all but ignored until she becomes possessed.  Believer is a very frustrating experience all around as it focuses on the least interesting parts of the story it lays and the cast, try as they may, are unable to give us much to latch on to especially since Green refused to actually conclude the film in a meaningful way. He was so focused on franchise appeal that, like so many before him, forgot that he still needed to make an impactful Part One.