Review: The Exorcist: Believer

Director:  David Gordon Green

Stars:  Leslie Odom, Jr., Lidya Jewett, Ann Dowd

While the trilogy that ultimately played out suggested an iffy approach to coherence, there was at least a sense that David Gordon Green’s recent Halloween triptych was well-meaning and part-way reverent to John Carpenter’s almighty original. Green and co-writer Danny McBride (yes, that one) had a feel for the autumnal mood and stripped-down, passive brutality of Michael Myers, even if the results of their efforts were uneven throughout. The swift announcement that they were moving on to do the same for The Exorcist, however, suggested a far more mercenary intention. That the former peddler of awful stoner comedies and occasional indie gems had found a lucrative line in horror rehashes, and wasn’t done cashing in yet.

This dismal suggestion – which I had hoped to see disproven – is all but cemented by The Exorcist: Believer, a requel that doesn’t seem remotely interested in understanding its predecessor, so long as it can strip it for parts.

Opening on a shot of fighting dogs – an ungainly callback to the aura of unrest that underpinned William Friedkin’s prologue – Green quickly places himself in the departed auteur’s shadow and fades from there. We’re in Haiti, 2010. Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and his unconvincingly pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) are holidaying when an earthquake rips their burgeoning family apart. Sorenne dies in the tragedy, but their daughter is saved. Flash-forward 13 years. Victor and daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) are living in leafy middle-American suburbia (almost indistinguishable from Green’s Haddonfield, actually), when Angela and her classmate Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) mysteriously disappear, having snuck off into the woods to perform a seance.

A good portion of the first hour is taken up with this mystery, with Victor’s dogged response to it as a terrified parent, and his agitated interactions with Katherine’s God-fearing parents. The mystery is compounded when the girls reappear 3 days later with no memory of having been missing. Leave it to Victor’s ‘religious nut’ neighbour Ann (Ann Dowd) to prognosticate that possession has found its way into the family. Of course she’s right.

Procedural as it may be, this first half is the best part of the film in a large part thanks to Odom, Jr.’s gritted-teeth commitment to Victor. He has flickers of a young Denzel and makes for a likable enough lead. During this time Green does little to conjure the gravitas or intellectual curiosity of William Peter Blatty’s classic tale, which was in part designed to scare complacent America back to the church. Instead it feels as though, at best, he’s auditioning for a guest director spot on True Detective. It’s not until the more direct connections to The Exorcist assert themselves that the true incompetence and ambivalence of The Exorcist: Believer becomes clear.

Ellen Burstyn is trotted out – Jamie Lee Curtis-style – to lend the picture some semblance of legacy cred, but the character of Chris MacNeill is dealt a swift disservice that feels both cruel and arbitrary. Her appearance feels like desperate glad-handing (itself fumbled thanks to the sour method of her sidelining). By this time the two girls are contorting their bodies like crazy, sputtering C-bombs and jumping out from behind windows, displaying all the usual tricks that have become the stuff of parody (intentional or otherwise) over the past 50 years.

In what feels like a nervous sweep for broader appeal, the focus on Catholicism is watered down and eventually negated. In spite of the religious fervour of the locals, the church is a non-committal bystander in this story. Instead Green presents a wishy-washy vigilante-style communal exorcism (“Evil dies tonight!”) that adheres to no specific secular dogma, relying on some sentimental horseshit about all belief being the same, before teetering precariously into some murky pro-life territory. Damnation, it seems, is just desserts for a choice made out of love.

The special effects in Friedkin’s The Exorcist may have lost their impact over the last half century, but his film remains acute in both its gripping intellectual curiosity regarding faith, and in its powerful evocation of how it feels to feel forsaken, irrespective of religious belief. Father Karras (Jason Miller) and Chris MacNeill are its twin totems in this regard. One a lapsed believer, the other a false idol. Green and his creative team show no interest at all in furthering either line of enquiry. Nothing as substantive is rendered in any of the characters here.

Neither does Green seem to have studied the methods by which Friedkin got under the skin of his audience, chiefly through a persistently disquieting sound design (one that still plays as nuanced and experimental today). Green’s film is flat by comparison, coasting on familiar “boo” moments; its only formal agitation coming in the form of some consistently horrible editing tics.

It all gradually gets worse and worse, and the announcement that this is intended as the first chapter in a trilogy itself unglues a lot of the threat. Green makes a song and dance in the third act, but it feels like a prelude to a longer battle to come.

Ironically, the style of exorcism performed here requires no fore knowledge, discipline or substantive hard work. It amounts to panicked improv. Grimly, this is exactly the level of sophistication Green and co. bring to the table. It’s like watching a child mimic adult behaviour and, frankly, it’s about as compelling.