The Exorcist: Believer – Film Review
by David Turpin

Director – David Gordon Green
Writers – Peter Sattler, David Gordon Green, Scott Teems
Stars – Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Nettles, Leslie Odom Jr.

After his passable Halloween sequel/reboot/retcon scared up a fortune in 2018, David Gordon Green fully abandoned his stoner comedies and rinky-dink Terrence Malick tributes to become an in-house director for low-cost-high-yield horror specialists Blumhouse.  His tenure thus far has delivered two Halloween sequels so ugly and incoherent they might have been thrown together in a cement mixer, and now this unlovely attempt to revive the (sorry) bedevilled Exorcist franchise.  As ever with Blumhouse / Gordon Green, it looks as if it was shot in a fortnight and hacked six-ways-from-Sunday in the edit room.  You may feel your head spinning, though not for the intended reasons.

This correspondent has never been much of a fan of William Friedkin’s original Exorcist film.  After its indelibly spooky Iraq-set prologue and a first hour that coolly juxtaposes the rational with the uncanny, it devolves into a tiresome string of shock effects, some of which have aged better than others.  It seems, more than anything, to be the tipping point at which commercial ‘horror’ cinema became primarily concerned with eliciting disgust.  Still, it had its strengths – and Gordon Green tries to recapture them.  The first was that aforementioned Iraq sequence, and you’re never going to get that on a Blumhouse budget (though there are some reasonably well-done scenes set in Port-au-Prince).  The second was the realistic, committed performance of Ellen Burstyn, playing the mother of Linda Blair’s possessed adolescent.  So – as is now the way of these things – Gordon Green brings her back.  Hopefully, someone cut her a big cheque.

As well as being one of the greatest living American actresses, Burstyn is also canny, certainly more so than – oh, say, Jamie Lee Curtis.  She does the only sensible thing here, and that is to get in and out with what looks like about two days’ worth of shooting (and a generous helping of slapped on post-recorded dialogue).  She shows up to help Victor – a beleaguered father played by the overqualified Leslie Odom, Jr. – whose daughter (Lidya Jewett) and her friend (Olivia O’Neill) have been infested by some kind of devilish force.  Speaking of overqualified, Ann Dowd is also on hand to give her considerable all to the role of a neighbour who becomes embroiled in the ensuing exorcism.

As ever with Gordon Green, there may be ideas here – not least a brief, promising moment where it seems as if the film is going to explore the idea of secular exorcism if such a thing is possible.  However, they come and go, unexplored and possibly accidental.  Such incoherence might not matter if the film was frightening, or even memorably grotesque.  However – while Jewett and O’Neill are both fairly good, under the circumstances – heightened sensitivities about the treatment of children on-screen mean there is nothing here to even remotely compare with the indignities visited upon Linda Blair in the original.  Whether or not this is a good thing is a question that goes to the essential ickiness of this franchise – though it’s worth noting that it never seems to have occurred to the film-makers that a possession might visit itself upon anyone other than a young girl in a nightdress.