From David Gordon Green, the director of one good Halloween movie and two terrible ones, comes the sinful The Exorcist: Believer, a wannabe exorcism flick that somehow fucks up one of the most formulaic aspects of any exorcism flick. Sinner! Sinner! Sinner!
Green had me going for a while. The first half of The Exorcist: Believer is quite good. The movie takes its time–almost too much time, but not quite–and made me believe that I was watching something elevated, something that would live up to the reputation of the classic original, at least to a degree. The patience begins to pay off as the two girls, played well by Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill, begin to show signs that things aren’t all hunky dory.
The Exorcist: Believer isn’t very scary, but Green sets an unsettling tone that hovers over everything that follows. What Green doesn’t do is go for the jugular or really attempt to do anything new and shocking, a shame given that the original The Exorcist was known for being new and shocking. It still stands the test of time as a result, something that will not happen here.
But it’s the second half where the Devil begins to win, and not in the way you kind of, sort of want the Devil to win in these kinds of movies. There’s a stretch in the middle of the movie where the two possessed girls disappear from the screen for a noticeable amount of time–The Exorcist: Believer begins to sag and lag, despite how good star Leslie Odom Jr. is (he’s great).
But eventually, to pick things back up, Green gets back into gear by getting to the thing we’ve all been waiting for: the exorcism. Thank God Almighty!
Except Green botches it. Big time. Having already wasted the return of Ellen Burstyn to the franchise (truly, WTF), Green does something even worse: he forgets to bring an exorcist into the story, despite the movie having “The Exorcist” in the title. It’s in the fucking title, dude. What he does instead is one of the sloppiest, lamest, exorcism sequences you’ll ever see, one that will convince you that yes, the Devil is real, and yes, the Devil deserves to win. It’s horrendous, and it’s unintentionally cheesy.
By the way, wouldn’t it have been cooler had the two girls been possessed by two separate demons instead of one, which doesn’t entirely make sense when you think about it.
The Exorcist: Believer isn’t a terrible movie, but its botched finale and lack of desire to press boundaries is the ultimate sin. David Gordon Green is now the director of three lame-to-bad horror movies in a row. May the Lord save us from a fourth.
As a side note, if you want to see an exorcism movie that successfully does something different in its third act, check out the Russell Crowe-starring The Pope’s Exorcist
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.