The Exorcist: Believer Review: A Seriously Scary Legacyquel That Bites Off A Bit More Than It Can Chew

It’s not a challenge to see the parallels between The Exorcist: Believer and 2017’s Halloween. To start, both are directed and co-written by David Gordon Green, but more significantly, the two films are respectively high profile sequels in franchises where bad chapters outnumber good ones, and they build on existing canon instead of being remakes (which includes bringing back iconic characters portrayed by the actors who originally played them). It’s the legacyquel/requel formula that is spelled out in wonderfully meta fashion in 2022’s Scream – and like Halloween and Scream, it’s another cinematic success… albeit an overcooked one.

The catch with legacyquels is that there is a tendency for filmmakers to lean on remake-esque narratives (seen in not only Halloween and Scream, but also Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Creed, and more), and to the credit of David Gordon Green and co-writer Peter Sattler, The Exorcist: Believer makes notable efforts to avoid that. Beyond there being two possessed girls instead of one, the film explores the idea of demon possession through more than just Catholic faith and brings other religions and belief systems into play. It’s a smart direction, but it gets mixed results. It doesn’t undercut the unholy terror that the movie produces, but it does create messiness in what is otherwise a strong, character-based story, particularly in the climax.

Leslie Odom Jr. stars as Victor Fielding, a photographer and single father who has forged a close relationship with his 13-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) following the death of his wife (Tracey Graves). When Angela asks him if she can go to a friend’s house after school one day, his overprotective instincts make him reticent, but he agrees to let her go… and that’s when the nightmare starts.

At the end of the school day, Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) are seen going off into the woods together, but they disappear after that, and the only trace they leave behind is their shoes and a pendant. Search parties are put together and the worst is feared – but after three days, the girls are found huddled together in a barn 30 miles away.

Victor and Katherine’s parents, Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz), are beyond relieved to have their children returned to them, but the horror show is far from over. The girls think that they’ve only been missing for a few hours, and mild strange behavior (like freezing and staring) eventually devolves into violent and disturbing outbursts. It becomes painfully clear that something is very wrong with Angela and Katherine, and while Victor is a skeptic by nature, he begins to question if something supernatural is plaguing his daughter and her friend.

The Exorcist: Believer has a great core group of characters, but it tries to do too much.

The foundation of The Exorcist: Believer is its characters – the film opening with a dramatic prologue set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti where the emotional stakes are established for Victor and his relationship with Angela. The first act operates as a non-genre drama about two families in crisis when their children go missing, and it’s effective and poignant storytelling all by itself before the horror truly kicks in.

The connection that this opening forges between the audience and the characters keeps you invested in their plight as things go from bad to much, much worse, and that slide into hell is well-paced and properly escalates. It’s in the families desperately searching for help or remedy where the movie gets a bit lost. The return of Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil is wonderful because her experience and insight has a meaningful impact on Victor, and Ann Dowd’s Ann is a nurse and former aspiring nun, which smartly bridges a gap between science and faith for the film. These are two key resources that are used well in the story… but also in the mix are a Catholic priest (E.J. Bonilla), Baptist and Pentecostal preachers (Raphael Sbarge and Danny McCarthy), and a root doctor (Okwui Okpokwasili). The commentary about demon possession being part of diverse faiths is loud and clear, but there isn’t enough time to provide each of them with the focus they need, and they mostly register as one-note supporting players.

Particularly during the third act, the film misses the intimacy of the original – with the simple triumvirate of Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin, Jason Miller’s Father Karras and the demon Pazuzu battling in Regan MacNeil’s bedroom – but it does still deliver significant twists and shocks.

Even seasoned horror fans will find The Exorcist: Believer putting ice in their veins. 

Long past desensitized to just about all matters of cinematic chaos, I’m not a movie-goer who scares easily. When the horror starts really ramping up, I’m the person in the audience who wears a cartoonish grin of delight while everyone else in my row is shrieking and averting their eyes. Because of this, I marvel when any film is able to crawl its way under my skin, and The Exorcist: Believer is the latest release to get that job done.

The original is so effective because of how wretched it is to see Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil manically twisted by the monster dwelling inside her, driving her to perverse and aberrant action, and David Gordon Green understands and delivers that energy. This is best exemplified in a scene with Katherine’s parents taking their deteriorating teenager to church (a sequence that made me feel like my blood was chilling and my organs were casually floating around inside my abdomen), but the truth is that the movie is freaky throughout. It’s a wholly different kind of horror than what the writer/director orchestrated with his Halloween movies, with seeping terror the priority over extreme brutality, and it has the disturbing energy that’s required – delivered through intensifying special effects makeup; staggering performances by Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum;  intimate cinematography, and unsettling editing that puts you off kilter with disturbing, flashing imagery.

Also like Halloween, The Exorcist: Believer is set up to launch a full trilogy of new films – but after a summer of “Part Ones” including Fast X, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, horror fans need not worry about an open-ended, incomplete narrative. It’s a surprisingly self-contained and satisfying scare fest, and while its reach exceeds its grasp in some regards, the movie’s strengths outweigh its faults, and genre fans will be excited to see an impressive big screen return for the possession-centric franchise.