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22% Tomatometer 252 Reviews 58% Popcornmeter 1,000+ Verified Ratings. Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years ago, Victor Fielding (Tony winner and Oscar®...
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Oct 4, 2023 · Critics say the new film starts off strong before succumbing to shopworn genre tropes, ultimately failing to make effective use of Ellen Burstyn's return to the franchise and uphold the Exorcist...
Horror. 111 minutes ‧ R ‧ 2023. Matt Zoller Seitz. October 6, 2023. 8 min read. “The Exorcist: Believer” is a pretty good movie that’s so stuffed with characters and not-quite-developed ideas that you may come away from it thinking about what it could have been instead.
Oct 4, 2023 · At the time of writing, the film has a critics' score of only 25% on Rotten Tomatoes after 64 reviews. In his own review for /Film, Witney Seibold wrote, "'The Exorcist: Believer' is as...
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By Tom Jorgensen
Posted: Oct 4, 2023 3:00 pm
“The greatest horror movie of all time.” It’s a common refrain in discussions of 1973’s The Exorcist, the first horror film ever to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. It legitimized, elevated, and influenced the genre in ways that are so pervasive, it can be difficult to revisit without thinking about the weight of its reputation. But at The Exorcist’s heart was a deceptively simple story of a mother with all the money in the world, with access to the best doctors in Washington DC, all of whom come to the conclusion that whatever is plaguing Regan MacNeil will take a priest to combat. Five years later, John Carpenter’s Halloween ushered in a new generation of horror built on even barer bones – mask, knife, and another innocent girl in the crosshairs of pure evil – and now both cinematic landmarks have been revived and streamlined by director David Gordon Green.
But whereas 2018’s Halloween set up a reckoning for Laurie Strode, her family, and her hometown that was inextricably tied to Michael Myers’ original killing spree, The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t have as clear a perspective into how the specifics of Regan’s possession are reverberating into the present day. That leaves Believer feeling relatively adrift and struggling to keep pace with the legions of imitators and innovators the original Exorcist inspired.
Believer follows the broad strokes of the original’s structure, which 50 years of homage should render predictable. Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is an atheist widower, and overprotective of his 13-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), who yearns for a little more breathing room. It’s a basic enough father-daughter dynamic to drop a demonic possession into – how Angela’s growing up feels like the scariest thing in the world to Victor, especially after her mother’s passing. Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) is similarly sheltered by devoutly Catholic parents Miranda and Tony (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz). Angela and Katherine have clearly bonded over being helicopter parented, and it's their shared rebellious streak that has them sneaking out to the woods to explore drain pipes and attempt contact with the spirit world, a guaranteed recipe for a bad time in a horror movie and one that leads to the girls disappearing for days without explanation as to where they could’ve gone.
Much of The Exorcist’s potency – and why the movie still works today – comes from the indomitable power of suggestion. Believer does a much better job of weaponizing what we’re not seeing in its first half, especially in the too-brief window of screen time where the girls’ disappearance is unresolved, and Green gets off to a strong start in building tension and dread. Angela and Victor’s close relationship, in spite of Victor’s zealous parenting, is charming, and the unanswered questions about Angela’s whereabouts give Odom a number of opportunities to play Victor’s bottled anxiety with immediacy. Green stages some creepy scenes in these early stages, where the girls’ true personalities are still close to the surface and influencing their actions – fingernail biting gets deployed in a particularly nasty way here. The horror is supported throughout by strong cinematography and sound design, which, at their best, evoke the surreal oppressiveness of William Friedkin’s original, while never quite standing shoulder to shoulder with it. A lot of the tension bleeds away once the girls return and have to battle back their inner demons – or, more accurately, their inner demon.
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The Exorcist: Believer takes a risk by introducing the concept of synchronized possession, an idea that works better in theory than in practice. The presence of two possession victims opens up a conversation about how disparate belief systems (or lack thereof) serve as a source of conflict and salvation under these extraordinarily trying circumstances, which is an interesting angle from a thematic standpoint. But while that may be the source of some interesting drama, it’s never applied to the film’s scares with much imagination. Each girl commits acts of heresy and violence, but Angela and Katherine spend most of the second act separated while succumbing to their demonic intruders. Few of the girls’ episodes feel especially tied to what the other is doing or has done, so their shared possession starts to just feel less “synchronized” and more “concurrent.”
The cacophony of different approaches to battling the demon, and the chaos of which rite is or isn’t working and when, makes the first half of the exorcism difficult to follow. These different belief systems working in tandem may serve the overall themes of Believer, but as an engine for the finale, they lack the simplicity and legibility of two pr...
On its own merits, The Exorcist: Believer is a simmering duel with the devil buoyed through a confused second act by an enthusiastic cast and a timely meditation on the importance of community during crisis. But Believer is also palpably reluctant to deviate from the formula of its legendary forerunner. Though its predestined, blockbuster exorcism ...
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Double the possession means double the problems for The Exorcist: Believer, which is a serviceable horror movie on its own merits, but a disappointing revival for a cornerstone of horror cinema.
Tom Jorgensen
Oct 4, 2023 · Director David Gordon Green takes possession of the best Exorcist movie since the original. By Alex Flood. 4th October 2023. Horror history is littered with subpar sequels and awful origin...
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Oct 4, 2023 · ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ Review: Double the Possession, Half the Fun. Two young girls bring something nasty home from the woods in this too-busy, uninvolving possession movie. Share full...
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