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In a just world, “The Exorcist: Believer” would mark the beginning of the end for Hollywood’s reboot craze.

The horror franchise revival is directed by David Gordon Green, who made the recent “Halloween” sequel trilogy that concluded with last year’s “Halloween Ends.” A direct sequel to the “The Exorcist” (1973), Green’s “Believer” understands little of what made its predecessor such a terrifyingly powerful horror film and is worse because of it.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, “The Exorcist” is one of the greatest works from William Friedkin, the late master auteur who also directed the Oscar-winning “The French Connection,” “Sorcerer” and the posthumously-released “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.” Both an astoundingly gifted image-maker and a humorously candid interview personality, Friedkin was an outspoken critic of sequels to “The Exorcist” and denied any involvement on “Believer.”

Given Friedkin’s antagonism towards any tampering of his work, it is no surprise that Green never consulted him while making “Believer.” Yet, with an end result utterly devoid of tension, perhaps Green should’ve reached out for a lesson in constructing memorable horror sequences.

Set 50 years after “The Exorcist,” the film follows Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.), a photographer who loses his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. Told by paramedics that he must choose whether they save his injured wife or their unborn child, the film’s most meaningful question of devotion, the film flashes forward to the present day where Victor raises his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett).

Early in the film, Angela and her Baptist friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) wander into the woods to perform a ritual that would allow Angela to speak to her dead mother. The girls disappear for three days and are found with unusual scars and burn marks.

They exhibit strange, violent behaviors causing Katherine’s mother Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) to theorize that the girls went to Hell and brought a demon back with them. With two possessed girls, Green doubles the stakes of the original film. By simply adding more, however, he loses intimate focus on his numerous characters as a result.

Leslie Odom Jr. is deeply committed to this role of an anxious father disconnected from his faith in God following his wife’s death. Yet Green hardly delves into this character’s grief or faith, nor does he explore Victor’s decision between his wife and unborn daughter with any depth beyond using the moment as a plot twist.

Victor already seems disconnected from God at the start of the film; one scene in a Haitian church has him leave to go take pictures from the building’s bell tower rather than stay to worship with his wife.

The scene is easy to forget by the time Victor unwittingly finds himself back in the presence of religion when his daughter is possessed. It feels like an entire act of the movie is missing when Victor finally discusses his lost faith in God.

The spiritual themes of “Believer” are strangely rudimentary for a film in “The Exorcist” series. Questions of religious doubt and sacrifice define the text of Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” written for the screen by Catholic author William Peter Blatty (adapting his own novel of the same name).

The original film’s air of uncertainty heightens its horror, with an elemental evil at the core that constantly challenges the characters’ faith in God and each other. But in “Believer,” the presence of religion is treated more as an obligation.

Green’s attempts to bring multiple religions together to stop the demon are similarly underdeveloped. Besides one character named Dr. Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili), a rootwork healer, most of the religions present in the film are of Christian denomination.

Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), returning from the original film, mentions that she researched “every” faith while trying to understand exorcisms; given this sentiment, it is a mystery why Green only recruits Hoodoo, Baptist, Pentecostalist and Roman Catholic characters in the purging of an ancient evil.

Any curiosity about faith is replaced by embarrassingly saccharine sentimentality that spits in the face of Friedkin and Blatty’s thematic ambiguity. Half-hearted messages of grief and togetherness are spelled out to the audience entirely through exposition. The film concludes on a note so clean you might get whiplash trying to connect this film to the narratively and visually restrained work of Friedkin.

For a sequel to a film with such viscerally horrifying craftsmanship, “Believer” is largely formless and desperate in its attempts to conjure horror. Its two most impactful moments are cheap jumpscares driven entirely by loud sound effects rather than frightening images – which the film sorely lacks.

Such surface-level thrills punctuate Green’s directorial instincts. He tries to differentiate his style from Friedkin’s by disorienting his audience rather than immersing us in an anxious atmosphere. Green’s use of frantic camerawork and editing rhythms are nauseating in a way that distracts rather than draws the viewer in. Whereas “The Exorcist” leans into its grotesque effects with patient camerawork, “Believer” is ashamed of being gory.

Nowhere is this stylistic incompetence more apparent than in the film’s scenes of possession and exorcism. Dim lighting and rapid, nauseating cross-cutting between banal images of smiling demon girls seem to show the film’s gore for as little as possible. Green greatly overestimates how creepy the makeup designs for the possessed girls are, as they are the only visual effects he shows in detail throughout the film.

The exorcism scenes are driven more by dialogue than the procedure itself. There isn’t a natural progression into the exorcism nor a steady build of tension within the scenes themselves. These moments are certainly loud, with characters yelling prayers and the demon girls groaning, but little is happening visually to make the exorcism scary until far too late into the runtime.

Having to follow up one of the scariest films ever made, Green is not in an envious position here. He could have simply copied Friedkin but instead opted for something different, which is admirable on the surface.

In trying to distance himself from Friedkin, however, Green’s direction ironically drowns in horror movie tropes that “The Exorcist” avoided, such as favoring jumpscares over atmosphere or centering around vague ideas of grief. The film further disrespects the legacy of the original with pandering callbacks to older characters while giving them little agency in the narrative.

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— Ed Whitfield (@edwhitfield) August 7, 2023

While “The Exorcist” will continue to play in theaters and scare new audiences for generations to come, “The Exorcist: Believer” isn’t even comparable to the misguided yet visually ambitious “Exorcist II: The Heretic” nor will it ever be more than a footnote on Friedkin’s legacy. Any self-respecting horror fans should pray for a spirit to possess Universal Pictures and force them to scrap their planned trilogy.

Published on October 8, 2023 at 9:12 pm