After having not one but two prequels and two sequels, The Exorcist got a third sequel. The Exorcist: Believer, from what I understand, was meant to be the first of a new series of Exorcist films. Judging from what a fiasco Believer is, I think we can put that idea away. The Exorcist: Believer is a horror film in that it is horrible beyond imagining.
While on a mix of a photographic assignment/vacation in Haiti, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and his heavily pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) find themselves in the midst of a major earthquake. The voodoo blessing that Sorenne got for their baby girl Angela didn't help save Sorenne's life as Victor is forced to decide between saving the mother or the child.
Thirteen years later, the teen Angela (Lidya Jewett) still wonders about her mother. She and her BFF Katherine West (Olivia O'Neill) decide the best thing to do is having their version of a seance to contact her. They end up disappearing into the Georgia woods, terrifying their parents Victor and Tony & Miranda West (Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer Nettles). The girls are eventually found, frightened, but what they think is a few hours has actually been three days. The deeply Christian West family and the atheist Fielding family are relieved to find the girls alive. However, they also observe their strange behavior. Angela attempts to strangle Victor with her mother's scarf. Katherine creates a scene at Service, screaming about "the body and blood".
What could be going on? To find out, Victor eventually seeks out Chris McNeill (Ellen Burstyn), who after her daughter Regan's exorcism has written a book and talked for years about their experiences. Could Angela and Katherine be possessed by a demonic force? Ann Brooks (Ann Dowd), a nurse and former nun, seeks out help from Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla). However, it will take an all-hands-on-deck approach, as this exorcism will need the Baptist Pastor Revans (Ralph Sbarge), Victor's neighbor and Pentecostal minister Stuart (Danny McCarthy) and witch doctor Dr. Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili) along with Ann and a bit of Father Maddox to try and expel the dark forces from the girls. Who will live, who will die and who will be literally blinded by their own stupidity?
The Exorcist: Believer has a screenplay credited to Peter Sattler and director David Gordon Green, with story by Green, Scott Teems and most surprising to me, Danny McBride. It would not surprise me if more hands were involved in the script. However, if so, at least these people had the good sense to not want to be publicly recognized.
The Exorcist: Believer is awful, awful, awful on every level imaginable. It might have even found new levels of awfulness unknown to man or demon. It is close to an hour in this almost two-hour movie before we get the first glimpses that something is satanically amiss. In that time, the audience must endure Leslie Odom, Jr.'s totally blank expression. The Exorcist: Believer has the worst single performance in Odom, Jr. to where one genuinely wonders if he can actually act or was just so bored with things he did not bother to act. No matter what the situation, Odom, Jr. had the same blank expression.
The nadir of this expressionless performance is when Victor and Chris go to the West house to find Katherine. The house is in total shambles, yet Victor calls out for Tony as if everything is fine and he just happened to wander in. Absolutely no reaction to the conditions around him, Odom, Jr. carries on, apparently totally oblivious to how the West house was pretty much destroyed.
The Exorcist: Believer also finally manages to drag then-91-year-old Ellen Burstyn into an Exorcist sequel (Linda Blair popping up in a last-second cameo). Blair appeared in Exorcist II: The Heretic, and Jason Miller decided that he needed work desperately enough to appear in The Exorcist III. Now, the set is complete, but at least Blair has the excuse that she was a teenager when she agreed to The Heretic. Burstyn should be embarrassed by this, particularly a noted line where she mentions that she herself did not witness Regan's exorcism.
"My opinion? Because I'm not a member of their damn patriarchy," she tells Victor over why she thinks she did not see the exorcism. Leave aside for the moment the patronizing and downright idiotic suggestion that sexism kept her out (I doubt that the two priests would have allowed anyone to witness, let alone participate in this ritual). In less than ten minutes, she ends up going alone into Katherine's room, attempting some kind of exorcism herself. Chris, who we are told is so knowledgeable about exorcisms that her memoir A Mother's Explanation is almost a how-to guide, gets literally stabbed in both eyes by a crucifix. For all of Chris' bemoaning about "the patriarchy", she ends up proving Fathers Merrick and Karras right in their exclusion of Chris.
Every performance from the adults is deeply embarrassing to silly, making The Exorcist: Believer into almost a comedy. I won't pick on Jewett and O'Neill as they are children who were given a thankless job and, I believe, did the best that they could with what they had. The adults, however, had no excuse. They all en masse looked laughable.
The Exorcist: Believer is worse in even the most basic elements of character. One wonders if anyone behind the film has ever met a Christian, let alone understand them. There is no way, NO WAY, that a Baptist minister would agree to participate in any kind of ceremony with essentially a witch doctor. The blending of Christian and occult practices would appall Reverend Revans (technically it is Pastor Revans, but I find the alliteration of Reverend Revans funny and perhaps unintentionally revealing). Moreover, The Exorcist: Believer seems to make the case that the occult practices of voodoo are what ends up saving at least one of the girls. After all, Believer begins with Sorenne receiving a blessing from a voodoo priestess.
Even if you rejected any objections to The Exorcist: Believer on it being almost vicious in how it treats Christianity be it Protestant, Catholic or Pentecostal, you cannot expect people to take seriously a character named "Dr. Beehibe". Demons flee at the name of Dr. Beehive.
I now genuinely think that The Exorcist: Believer was not a serious attempt to make a horror film. It was meant as a spoof. Either that, or maybe Danny McBride just looked out the window, saw a beehive and said, "Now THERE'S my witch doctor who will take down the devil". When Katherine calls out "The body and the blood" at her service, I was howling with laughter.
On so many levels, The Exorcist: Believer does not make any sense. Father Maddox, in a rushed scene, attempts to convince the local Catholic hierarchy about the need for the exorcism "based on what I witnessed with my own eyes". In the film, he witnessed nothing. As much as the film wants us to be shocked or horrified or empathetic towards the characters, we fell nothing. Well, perhaps contempt for them to where when the possessor demands that the parents choose between Angela and Katherine, I would have been fine if neither made it.
Should you be curious as to which child lives or dies, it should be clear.
The Exorcist: Believer attempts to make things scary with its dominant greenish/bluish tinting throughout. The end result is just to make the film look ugly and laughable. The editing, particularly during dual examination of the girls, makes it almost frenetic to confused.
Simultaneously boring and blasphemous, The Exorcist: Believer may not be just the worst film of 2023. It may be one of the worst films of all time.
THE EXORCIST FILMS
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