In hindsight, The Exorcist: Believer poster I discovered tossed in a urinal within the movie show rest room earlier than tonight’s press screening was in all probability a unhealthy omen. You may even name it an indication from God. And like so most of the silly mortals on this new movie, I didn’t heed His warnings. For my sins, I used to be damned for the following 111 minutes.
What occurred right here? The director and co-writer, David Gordon Inexperienced, has had success prior to now updating traditional horror franchises. In 2018, he continued the unique Halloween in a approach that felt fashionable, well timed, and scary. Inexperienced used that supply materials to inform a narrative in regards to the lingering psychological results of trauma on a survivor like Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode. The same premise wafts via his model of The Exorcist, to no discernible impact. A few of Inexperienced’s decisions listed here are downright unusual — like the truth that this film doesn’t actually have an exorcist character. In case your movie known as The Exorcist: Believer, shouldn’t it have a kind of?
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As an alternative, Inexperienced focuses on a photographer named Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), a single father who hovers over his 13-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) as a result of her mother died in childbirth and made him vow to all the time shield their youngster. Victor received’t even let poor Angela go to a good friend’s home after college to do her homework. C’mon Victor! It’s simply homework at a good friend’s home! What might probably go improper?
Nicely, for starters, each Angela and her good friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) might go lacking for 3 days, then flip up 30 miles away with no reminiscence of how they received there or what they did within the interim. They might additionally start displaying the telltale indicators of demonic possession: Wounds that received’t heal, talking in tongues, excreting unusual bodily fluids, the works. Victor is understandably skeptical in regards to the existence of a benevolent god after the entire hardships he has endured, however his deeply religious neighbor Ann (Dowd) is satisfied that there are Satanic shenanigans afoot. She provides Victor a e-book about exorcisms, which he instantly tosses apart. Then he sits down, waits about 4 seconds, picks the e-book again up, and is instantly satisfied that his daughter is beneath the thrall of Pazuzu.
It seems Ann’s e-book was written by Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the heroic mom of Regan, the possessed woman from the unique Exorcist movie. (You recognize, the Exorcist directed by William Friedkin that really had an exorcist in it.) Chris counsels Victor about how one can take care of Angela’s plight, and warns him that skepticism will solely take you thus far. When your daughter can learn folks’s minds and bleed from any orifice on the drop of a hat, that looks like smart recommendation.
After which … nicely, I in all probability shouldn’t say what occurs subsequent. However I’ll say that the best way The Exorcist: Believer makes use of Burstyn made me a little bit offended. Why deliver her again in any respect if this is what you’re going to do together with her? (There have been 5 Exorcist prequels and sequels earlier than this one, and Burstyn by no means appeared in any of them.) The worst half is that Burstyn’s scenes are the one good ones in The Exorcist: Believer; the remainder of the movie might have used her steely presence and haunted line readings.
As an alternative, Believer swiftly descends into unhealthy horror film hell. Though I’ve no first-hand data in regards to the manufacturing, it seems that this Exorcist could have been closely truncated and reworked in post-production — most clearly in a scene the place Burstyn delivers a two-minute monologue nearly solely off-screen whereas the digital camera focuses on an infinite closeup of Odom’s face. Then all of a sudden it’s exorcism time, although the movie has spent lower than a handful of minutes with its one Catholic priest character. A lot of its supposed rigidity hinges on Victor, and whether or not he’ll start to imagine in God. However whenever you’ve seen two women sprout scars out of skinny air, converse with evil demon voices, and synchronize their heartbeats, it doesn’t take an entire lot of religion to entertain the notion of a better energy.
The Exorcist positioned its supernatural story in a grounded and believable world, which made it all of the scarier when Linda Blair’s head began spinning round like a rusty carousel. Set in suburban Georgia as a substitute of Washington D.C., The Exorcist: Believer by no means creates something like that sort of lived-in actuality or characters we develop to care about. Victor’s complete character is that he’s an overprotective dad (apparently with good cause). Early scenes vaguely nod on the approach fashionable People thoughtlessly mistreat their neighbors, but when that was meant to construct to some sort of cathartic payoff later within the movie that materials received lower, together with any scenes that may have fleshed out the opposite lacking woman’s mother and father (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) into something past cartoonish stereotypes of God-fearing churchgoers.
Folks routinely label Exorcist II: The Heretic as one of many worst sequels ever made, however at the least that film was going for one thing. No matter its flaws, it had some concepts and it’s by no means boring. The Exorcist: Believer commits that sin, and so many extra.
RATING: 3/10
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