50 years ago, The Exorcist, one of the greatest horror movies of all time, was released. It blew both the box office and left audiences petrified; unfortunately however, this dead horse of a franchise keeps being beat down with progressively worse and worse projects, with this movie only contributing to that fact. Although this movies does have its moments with its sets, cinematography, and art direction, it’s completely dragged down by its undeveloped characters, the continuity errors, and its horrible, lazy tie into the original, via Chris Macneil, the mother of the possessed girl in the original Exorcist film.
To start off, the beginning of this movie was actually really well shot and written. Thirteen years after losing his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake, Victor Fielding (played by Leslie Odom Jr.) and his daughter, Angela (played by Lidya Jewett), are settled in Georgia. Aside from tolerating a grumpy neighbor (played by Ann Dowd) and her complaints about Victor’s trash can management, the two seem happy enough. Everything is fine, until Angela and her friend just walk into the woods and decide to do some sort of seance for some reason, resulting in them going missing for three days doing God knows what, just to be found randomly in a barn.
While this movie does have many concerns there are some genuinely impressive choices and performances: the child actors actually do a really good job of selling the idea that they are slowly transforming into demons. They constantly torment the people around them, and tempt them to make a deal with the devil. Aside from them, performances from almost the whole cast were really solid with a few exceptions. The priest (played by Raphael Sbarge) had terrible acting, so much so that he felt like a parody of the priest of the original, taking the audience away from the main conflict.
Another strength this movie has is its amazing cinematography. The style this movie has is unique and well executed. You feel the emotion of the scenes and the dread these characters face through all the shots. There’s only a few flat shots that look boring, but besides those, the rest of the cinematography is really solid.
However these commendable ideas are not enough to save this movie from falling into mediocrity. One of my most mild complaints is the lack of character depth. Ninety percent of the characters are surface-level caricatures of the average stereotype demonic horror movie: the overprotective parents, the skeptic who learns to believe for plot purposes, and the old lady who knows everything about demons and can explain the lore to the main characters. The only people who really get fleshed out are the main character and especially the demons, which I wish we got to see more of.
Another more infuriating grievance I have with this film is their undeveloped tie-in to the original with Chis Macneil (played by Ellen Burstyn), who as mentioned earlier, acts as the only bridge between the original and the new legacy movie. While Ellen Burstyn does a serviceable job in the movie, she is not nearly in this movie enough for the audience to really care about her character. She just appears as just a plot device to give some explanation of the monster and how to beat it.
Finally the biggest issue for this movie is the fact that it isn’t scary. Even for a modern horror movie there aren’t a lot of jump-scares, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, for a “horror” movie released in October, there isn’t enough here to give you that rush of fear the original gave.
In conclusion, The Exorcist: Believer is a disappointing horror movie that had some genuinely interesting concepts and developments that ultimately fell flat due to a lack of understanding of what made the original horror movie so great. However, if you want to watch a movie of six adults screaming “JESUS!” for two hours then I recommend it. For these reasons and grievances, I’ll give it a five and a half out of ten.
