A few days ago, I rewatched The Exorcist. Partially to prepare for this new entry in the franchise, but also to fulfill our household Hooptober obligations (if you’ve never participated in this hallowed October tradition on Letterboxd, which is basically a horror movie scavenger hunt, I highly recommend it). While I’m not the biggest fan of Friedkin’s film for a few reasons, it’s difficult to deny his approach to economy of storytelling. The most interesting stretch is everything before the actual possession takes place, and the exorcism itself is a bit perfunctory. It’s the characters and their own struggle with faith that is of greatest interest to this viewer. Yet, this is anathema to modern horror filmmaking. Putting aside a studio like A24 – who have their own creative struggles – the major studios continually are convinced that character and narrative pacing simply doesn’t matter. As long as there’s jump scares and Marvel-style easter eggs, everyone involved dusts their hands off and rides off into the sunset. Chalk up David Gordon Green’s latest horror folly as another example of this exhausting trend.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t hate Green’s previous Halloween reboot. I found its focus on trauma to be a little worn thin, especially by its second entry that found more than just its central heroine unable to shake those same past scars. But the films, up until Halloween Ends ruined any goodwill that remained, were at least enjoyable popcorn fodder. That’s more than you can say for a lot of horror franchise outings. His new extension of The Exorcist by contrast…it commits every sin in the book.
There are two moments of narrative invention worth dwelling on in The Exorcist: Believer: the first finds its protagonist, Tanner (Leslie Odom Jr, slumming it for a paycheck here, no shade), on a vacation in Haiti with his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves). There’s a really lovely cultural aspect here that sees Sorenne’s baby get blessed by the locals, and for that short while, I was reminded of the Iraq opening in Friedkin’s film. The idea that there’s this larger world outside of the small circle of which the majority of the story will take place does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of greater verisimilitude. And the absorption of the 2010 Haitian earthquake makes for a intriguing inflection point and gives way to the only tension of the entire film. The aftermath leaves a choice in Tanner’s hands, to save his wife or his unborn child. The choice he makes ends up haunting him throughout the movie, but it also leaves a terrible taste that leans the entire script into an off-putting anti-choice direction by film’s end.
Despite the subject matter, the original has a sense of greater impotence. Yeah, sure, demons exist but it’s not like these priests have the ability to do anything about it. The titular exorcism doesn’t really work, and that kind of ruthless approach to the concept of faith-healing is a big part of why the original has so much staying power when these other rip-offs that have happy and devout endings wind up in the dustbin of history. I guess someone at the studio decided they needed to win back some folks in middle America with this one.
If it’s need to pull its punches and even kowtow to The Sound of Freedom crowd was its only flaw, one could work past that easily enough if the story had the juice to keep things rolling. But no, this is soulless, corporate filmmaking at its worst. It’s an effort that just goes through the motions, with its lone wrinkle to the formula being that this time TWO girls get possessed instead of one (cue the excitement in a pitch meeting). And its need to reach back into the franchise’s history to bring back Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil is tacked on and perfunctory. I’m pretty well convinced that all of her scenes were added in reshoots, because her actual role in the story is negligible and she pops in and out while any moments of incident occur outside of her periphery. To be blunt, this would have been better served to have no connections to the first film whatsoever, but I guess when a studio drops $400 million for the rights they’re going to make use of them no matter how creatively vacuous the entire affair is.
The greatest knock on Believer, putting aside its questionable politics and its cheap need to connect to a much stronger filmmaker, is that it just carries no stakes whatsoever. And when the conclusion rolls around during the inevitable (multi-denominational, perhaps its most inventive idea) exorcism scene, it’s so badly edited a scene had to be added out of a completely different kind of horror film just to clarify what the heck happened. As if poor Raphael Sbarge’s preacher character outright saying what happened wasn’t enough.
Who would have thought we’d feel wistful for the days of Halloween Ends?