The Exorcist: Believer
UNIVERSALSometimes film studios put a little too much faith in a director after they pump out a few too many box office hits, even when those films would've been hits had they been directed by just about anyone else. This is how audiences end up with The Exorcist: Believer. The majority of David Gordon Green's career in filmmaking takes place within the field of comedy before being handed the keys to the Halloween franchise in 2018. Due to the overwhelming success and relatively positive feedback that the film received Green was allowed to make his – very divisive – trilogy of Halloween films. Between the second and third entries he was, unfortunately for horror audiences, handed the keys to The Exorcist franchise in announcing a new trilogy. His first venture in doing so has ultimately produced one of the worst, if not the worst, legacy sequels in recent memory.
The Exorcist: Believer stars Leslie Odom Jr. as the father of a young possessed girl. The plot is relatively simple and the film itself is paced surprisingly well for being such a tonally inconsistent mess. That doesn't mean that the entire runtime is unbearable as the setup within the first act is, while straightforward, surprisingly compelling and could lead most general audiences to believe what they are watching could be one of the finer entries in this struggling franchise. This is not the case. By the time the audience is witnessing the actual possession begin to take place the cracks have begun to show. Any originality or worthwhile moments have taken a backseat to the worst aspects of a legacy sequel. This is when Ellen Burstyn comes into the picture connecting this film squarely to the 1973 classic, The Exorcist, and she is doing her best with some of the worst dialogue of 2023. It is around this point in the film that something else becomes blindly obvious: a constrained budget.
There is a lot that happens to get the audience to the final act of the exorcism itself. The only issue is that, with the addition of the film faltering heavily in most regards up until that point, the exorcism itself is laughably bad. The performances are unintentionally hilarious, the scene-chewing is unbearable, and the set design is ever so bland. The film delves from being a missed opportunity into being an unwatchable mess. There's realistically nothing worse a film can do than fall into unwatchable territory in its final act, but Believer does just that.
This is not a film to recommend to just anyone, especially those with an affinity for the original film, because due to the treatment of certain legacy characters – surprises and otherwise – this does the near improbable, still possible, task of making the forty-year-old classic worse. By doing damage to these characters, as well as what they had originally accomplished, the audience is left feeling unfulfilled by a film with almost no redeeming values past the halfway point. This leads to the final, and possibly worst, part: this is not a film with any scares.
Being a sequel to what many regard as one of the scariest films of all time, and rightfully so, there are close to zero moments of genuine tension. Then, of course, there's the grossly negligent reliance on false jump scares and unearned loud noises being pitched at the screen. There's almost no way that this new trilogy of films can satisfyingly come to fruition, and Universal/Blumhouse should seriously consider reevaluating who they hand this franchise off to next, as David Gordon Green is not capable of doing something worthwhile with it. While he is a writer, and director, that has interesting ideas, he is helpless when it comes to turning those ideas into anything besides what The Exorcist: Believer is: a borderline unwatchable mess that isolates its target audience and a misunderstanding of what it is trying to honour. The Exorcist is an iconic film that stands the test of time. The Exorcist: Believer, however, is a DVD discount bin filler, and that's such a shame.