David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy will probably continue to divide fans of that franchise for years to come. It’s three films that took at big swing. For all their faults though, those three films at least attempted something. They’re three slasher films that at least felt like pure slasher films. No overt meta humor gets used or commentary on the genre as a whole. The first two films at least came across as continuations of films that Green and his frequent collaborator Danny McBride enjoyed. The three films felt thematically tied together as a commentary of America and American tragedy. They were ambitious for slashers, a genre that tends not to be ambitious. If any franchise was in need of rehabilitation, it was probably the Halloween films. So there was always possibility in him bringing something new when The Exorcist: Believer was announced.
While Halloween was a film people had to remember John Carpenter directed and thus worthy of watching, the same can’t be said about The Exorcist. That film is one whose reputations remains intact even with a lot of oddball sequels. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it is a film that totally redefined every horror movie that came after it. It remains a must see film for every budding horror fan, especially those with a religious upbringing. Even today, it still gets referred to as the scariest film ever made. It’s not a film in need of any kind of reappraisal or in need of a legacy sequel.
Yet the filmmakers behind The Exorcist: Believer thinks it’s doing something like that. Much like the first film, it is a film about a parent trying to understand what is happening to their child. This time it’s Leslie Odom Jr. as single parent Victor. His daughter and her friend disappear into the woods one day. They cannot be found until both show up three days later and thirty miles away. Soon after they reappear, both girls begin spouting obscenities and looking horrific.
If none of that sounds new, it isn’t. The most obscene thing in the movie is that none of it is really obscene or even profane. It’s still shocking almost 50 years later to see Regan McNeil masturbate using a cross or hear the demonic entity inside her say that Father Karras’ mother sucks cocks in hell. But The Exorcist remains scary not because it’s about a young girl possessed by a devil. That’s only part of the terror. The real terror of The Exorcist lies in whether or not Father Karras’ faith can endure what he witnesses. It doesn’t. Rather than let the soul of a young woman get damned, he damns his own by taking the demon into himself and committing suicide. Karras saves the day but at the cost of his soul.
There’s nothing in this movie that feels like that kind of sacrifice or even particularly that religious. The film certainly has characters in it who are religious. One of the girls comes from a family of devout Evangelical Christians and Ann Dowd portrays a nurse who was at one point a Catholic nun. Yet the central conflict in here isn’t really religious. It’s mostly a question of how to get rid of whatever entities possess these young women who mostly say mean things. The finale mostly consists of the adults forming a prayer circle with the United Bennetton Colors of Faiths. There is religious allegory in here but it seems like an after thought. The central struggle of the film just feels like what people expect of an Exorcist film. It’s just’s bad things happening to young women instead of the internal conflict tested by this horrible situation.
The greatest sin of this film though is wasting the great Ellen Burstyn. At 90 years old, this movie needs Ellen Burstyn more than Ellen Burstyn needs to do another Exorcist movie. Still Ellen Burstyn is game and a welcome presence in the film. That is until the film, in maybe the most shocking scene of the film (and that’s said lightly), decides to violently sideline her. Then she spends the rest of the film in a hospital bed. It’s clear her presence is supposed to lend the film an air of Jaime Lee Curtis authenticity. Instead, her being in the film just comes across as stunt casting and a waste of a talent. Like no one should expect a 90 year old woman to do much. Yet if she’s going to spend part of her remaining time on Earth doing something, it should be more than a glorified cameo in a bad legacy sequel.
Even if you didn’t like David Gordon Green’s Halloween sequels, at least he attempted to say something in them. The same can’t be said about The Exorcist: Believer. It’s an Exorcist film whose filmmakers made what they think people want out of an Exorcist film. Instead they committed the sin of boredom and damned viewers (and Ellen Burstyn) to wasting their time.
Cinema Dual 
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