Film review: ‘THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER’, by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

William Friedkin’s 1973 cinema adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist was one of the film events of the decade. Disturbingly powerful and superbly crafted, it chilled cinemagoers like no film before while surprisingly sparking huge interest in Mike Oldfields ‘Tubular bells’ which was used on the soundtrack. Even half a century later that film has lost little of its insidious power to scare the crap out of viewers.   This, however, can’t be said of the sequels and countless imitations that followed; Exorcist 2: The Heretic from 1977, was in fact labelled one of the turkeys of the decade.

The latest addition to the demonic possession genre and arguably the latest instalment in Exorcist canon, The Exorcist: Believer has what may be seen as stunt casting and an attempt to try and convince us that it should be mentioned in the same breath as the original film, namely the return of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, the mother from The Exorcist.

Believer, however, is directed by David Gordon Green who is responsible for the outrageously overrated Pineapple Express, the flat out atrocious Your Highness, the surprisingly decent 2018 Halloween reboot and the extremely disappointing Halloween Ends.  Which David Gordon Green has turned up for The Exorcist: Believer.  For a reasonable portion of the film, it’s the Halloween 2018 version but that doesn’t make up for the fact that, while a fairly solid and sometimes intense piece of mainstream horror and certainly a better film than Halloween Ends, Believer is in no way as scary, subversive or artistically impressive as the original Exorcist.

At first, the film appears to be heading into Slender Man territory as two 13-year-old girls, Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia Marcum) disappear in the woods for three days, sparking fears of an abduction.  When they reappear confused and upset, it’s clear they’ve undergone a strange experience.  Soon, each begins to display increasingly disturbing behaviours, shifting from odd trances to violent outbursts. With medical science failing to provide answers, Angela’s father, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr) consults none other than Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) mother of Regan, who has become a talk show regular relating her experiences from 50 years ago.  As Chris did back in the 1970’s, Victor agrees to an exorcism to try rid his daughter and Katherine of the demon. This time, however, it won’t just be a Catholic rite but a multi-faith exorcism involving Baptists and voodoo practitioners.

The film includes most of the familiar Exorcist tropes, the young girls with scarred disfigured faces, evil rasping voices, levitation and green vomit.  While delivered with some punch, these just feel like a horror movie bag of tricks rather than the deeply unsettling intrusion of dark forces they represented in the original film.

Green manages to maintain an effectively grim tone throughout and the script doesn’t take any silly tangents or at least anything that would have seemed totally out of place in the original film.

While the book on which the original Exorcist was based was in part about reasserting the prominence of the church by scaring people into embracing God, William Friedkin’s film critiqued patriarchal power and institutions in its depiction of two celibate males trying to control the often-sexualised outbursts of a teenage girl.  Despite having two possessed teenage girls, Believer lacks that potent subtext but does touch on the idea of community, hope and faith as ways to suppress evil.

Given the director’s resume, The Exorcist: Believer was a little better than expected but it doesn’t come close to the original in terms of fright value and filmmaking quality nor does it match the best of contemporary horror like the Conjuring films.

Nick’s rating: **1/2

Genre: Drama/ Horror.

Classification: MA15+.

Director(s): David Gordon Green.

Release date: 5th Oct 2023.

Running time: 111 mins.

Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.

 

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