'The Exorcist: Believer' Is as Soulless as Sequels Get

[Spoilers ahead for The Exorcist and The Exorcist: Believer]

I’m not sure why I’m surprised that The Exorcist: Believer is such a crass cash-grab. Maybe it’s because director and co-writer David Gordon Green used to be a real filmmaker who made character-driven dramas, or that his recent trilogy of Halloween movies may not have been good, but at least took some fairly large swings. But The Exorcist: Believer is lazy to its core; a film that has nothing to say except the most milquetoast of bromides wrapped in the same kind of tired exorcism imagery spawned by William Friedkin’s 1973 original. But whereas Friedkin’s movie was a slow burn about the erosion of faith in the modern world, Green plays by the same tired beats of every exorcism horror where faith is tested and rewarded in the face of a demon tormenting a child.

Believer starts on an icky note where the story begins in Haiti in 2010. Our protagonist Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) is working as a photographer with his pregnant wife in tow. The earthquake hits, she’s grievously injured, and doctors present him with the choice of saving either his wife or their unborn child. I’m not thrilled with using a real-world tragedy as a jumping-off point for a film about supernatural terror. You’re using real torment (the most conservative estimate is that 100,000 people died in the Haiti earthquake) as a gateway to fictional torment, and the film makes no effort to reconcile the two. The only reason her accident is in the Haiti earthquake rather than a car accident in the U.S. is so that a Haitian ritual can “protect” her unborn child, which feels more like the film trying to stress a plot point that comes later—this is an exorcism movie rooted in all faiths, not just Catholicism.

13 years later, and Victor and his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) are living happily in Percy, Georgia. Victor takes Angela to school one day where she meets up with her pal Katherine (Olivia Marcum). After school, the two kids go into the woods to perform a ritual that will allow Angela to commune with her dead mother. However, the girls don’t come home that night, and are missing for three days. When they’re found in a barn, they think that only a few hours have passed, and their bodies show signs of injury. When they’re sent home from the hospital, they quickly show signs of possession and that leads Victor to seek out Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), who wrote a book about exorcism after the events of 1973’s The Exorcist because you can’t make a reboot these days unless it ties back into the original movie with the star of that film now in a supporting role.

I’m not sure what attracted Green to this project. For Blumhouse and Universal, the appeal is obvious: it’s a name-brand horror franchise, the cost is relatively inexpensive, and horror films tend to perform well at the box office. And yet you don’t really need “The Exorcist” name here. Earlier this year, we got The Pope’s Exorcist, and at least that had Russell Crowe riding around on a little Vespa and doing an Italian accent. But it’s the same idea—a skeptical individual has his or her faith tested when confronted with a possessed child who speaks to them of their own sins, but faith wins out.

Ironically, even though The Exorcist basically invented the exorcism movie, the original film is a much bleaker narrative where the evil of the world is inexplicable, there’s no real way to “defeat” it, and we’re left with more questions than answers. Since then, filmmakers have looked at that film and thought, “Well, that’s nice, but I need more of a child acting possessed, more ritual arcana, and then a happy ending where faith beats the demon.” Green takes this to an unintentionally comic level by possessing two girls and then arguing that exorcism isn’t rooted in Catholicism, but comes from all faiths and people acting together, so what you really need is the strength of community.

The most charitable read I could give is that Green is wrestling with what it means for people to come together for a common good. If you go back to 2021’s Halloween Kills, he sees a mob mentality where a bunch of goobers go around changing, “Evil dies tonight!” before Michael Myers brutally offs them because he can’t be killed for some reason. Yet here, Green eagerly proselytizes, arguing that spiritual power comes not from any faith tradition, but from any community willing to engage a higher power. In this way, there’s no problem collecting a humanist, a lapsed Catholic, a few evangelical Christians, and a root healer to all perform an exorcism.

But even here, the notion of community collapses, and it simply becomes a competition to see whose faith is strongest and who will sell out the community in a moment of weakness. At this point, you’re not really telling a story about anything but simply throwing twists at the screen, hoping to see if anything sticks. Green knows how to construct spooky imagery and do jump scares, but so do countless other directors. Friedkin’s film succeeded by creating a deep sense of existential dread. Yes, the stuff with Regan (Linda Blair) is horrific, but it wouldn’t work as well if Friedkin hadn’t spend the first hour of the film meticulously setting up tension and stakes of his movie beyond, “We must save this little girl,” with no easy answers about what that would entail.

Comparatively, Green is all too happy to leap to familiar boogeymen. Why do the girls get possessed? Because they were playing with black magic. In The Exorcist, Regan may have become possessed by playing with an Ouija board or maybe there was something in the attic or maybe someone across the world dug up the wrong statue. What makes the film terrifying and poignant is that evil can come into your life from anywhere. The Exorcist: Believer essentially punishes its two children for messing with forces beyond their comprehension and trying to have experiences outside the watchful eyes of their parents.

With a new Satanic Panic on the rise, it feels particularly irresponsible of Green and his collaborators to be so careless with their plotting, essentially saying that the devil is real, keep a closer eye on your children, and you don’t need any kind of authority to perform rituals that you believe would make you and your family safer. The film may hedge by trying to nod to faith traditions outside a Judeo-Christian mold, but the conclusions remain as unimaginative and tedious as most other exorcism movies. While blockbusters may get a lot of flack for mindless follow-ups, Green and his cohort are out here proving you can be just as vapid with a low-budget horror sequel.