By Keith Walther | Rose Law Group Reporter
Not even the return of Ellen Burstyn can breathe life into this horror franchise that hasn’t been any good since the first movie came out in 1973. “The Exorcist: Believer” is the sixth film in the series but acts as a direct sequel to the original, ignoring all other films in between. It starts out with a well-constructed story arch but quickly devolves into a hideously laughable conclusion.
Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a single father who suddenly and tragically lost his wife 13 years ago. His daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), is a teenager who never got the chance to know her mother. Curiosity about her mother leads her to find a secluded place in the woods with her religious friend, Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), to perform a ritual to communicate with her mother’s spirit. Unfortunately for them, they open a door to something else far more sinister than they could ever imagine.
After a 3-day hiatus, the two young ladies miraculously return to their panicked parents with no recollection of that lost time. As the parents soon realize, their girls brought something back with them, and it changes them into unrecognizable, malevolent, foul-mouthed ghouls. Victor understands he’s up against something that modern science has no answer for, so he recruits the one person with experience in this realm, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn). They along with the other parents, some random shamans of some sort, and a couple of excessively nosy neighbors work together to save the souls of both girls.
Director David Gordon Green follows “Halloween Ends,” which was the worst film of 2022, with a slightly better effort, but certainly not enough to make it a worthwhile filmgoing experience. He takes a methodical approach in the first half of the film, developing the father/daughter characters, opening the movie with a tragic flashback scene that sets the stage for their dynamic. Green then successfully builds the anticipation and suspense for what is to unfold, initially catching the audience off guard with some well-timed jump scares. All of this creates hope that Green has figured how to make a good horror film, but this hope quickly gets thrown off a cliff to smash against the jagged rocks of disappointment.
Green tries to generate a shock and awe, double rainbow sort of moment by having double the exorcisms but making no attempt whatsoever to develop the Katherine character even though she was an equally important character in the story. The resulting ambivalence towards that character and her family makes the whole effort wasted. He then resorts to gimmicky ploys to increase drama and manufacture fear, but only creates snickering chuckles instead at the absurdity of those moments. And no amount of horror make-up can mask the messy disaster that was the conclusion. The demonically possessed girls writhing and growling while strapped down in their chairs surrounded by random characters spewing out prayers from different denominations simultaneously makes the whole thing look more like a circus.
Oscar nominee Leslie Odom Jr. (“One Night in Miami…”), puts forth a solid, commendable performance that fully invests the audience in his character. Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill are young, inexperienced actresses who needed great direction to pull believable performances from them, but the audience is left with two girls trying to be scary in their make-up. Ellen Burstyn, reprising her role from the 1973 classic, was strictly used for nostalgic appeal with her character being more of a background piece than an integral catalyst to the story.
While there’s no shortage of exorcism style horror films, making it difficult to give audiences something they haven’t seen before, good directors find creative ways to at least provide worthwhile entertainment. “The Exorcist: Believer” represents another celebrated horror franchise crashing and burning at the hands of David Gordon Green. Even the studio was more terrified of going against Taylor Swift than of this film, bumping it up from its original release date of October 13th to October 6th. That should tell you all you need to know about the quality of this production.
This movie earns:
