“Sometimes, to go forward,” root doctor Beehibe (Okwul Okpokwasili) tells sceptical Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) in The Exorcist: Believer, “you have to go back.” This is also the guiding principle behind the film itself, which is both a 50th-anniversary sequel to William Friedkin’s peerless possession horror The Exorcist, and a putative opener to a new trinity of Blumhouse pictures – in much the same way that director David Gordon Green previously resurrected, revolutionised and trilogised John Carpenter’s Halloween.
Green certainly does go back, disinterring many of the original’s ‘greatest hits’: fighting dogs in the prologue, a ‘cunting daughter’ scarred and suppurating, a bloodied crucifix, projectile spew, a revolving head, and the odd legacy character or two, all to the familiar strains of Tubular Bells. Yet he is also giving these tropes a different (head)spin, with a new story and characters to confront the old devil.
In 2010, as photographer Victor Fielding holidays with pregnant Sorenne (Tracey Graves) in Port-au-Prince, an earthquake exposes an impossible dilemma: whether to save his wife or his unborn child. Now widowed and still haunted by the problem of evil that this incident highlighted, Victor has stopped believing. Yet when his beloved teen daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) engages in a transgressive ritual with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum), hoping to make contact with the mother she never knew, the two girls instead bring back something else which possesses the pair of them.
As Victor joins forces with Katherine’s god-fearing parents Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) and Miranda (Jennifer Nettles), his neighbours Ann (Ann Dowd) and Stuart (Danny McCarthy), and a collection of priests, healers – and Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) from the first film – he will, in trying to save these two girls, revisit a familiar dilemma.
Here the players and possessions are multiplied – legion, even. The devil now has two backs, and all these people with their different crises of faith become like the Avengers assembling, so that the room in which the climactic, lengthy exorcism takes place seems as busy and overcrowded as the narrative is unfocused. William Peter Blatty, screenwriter of Friedkin’s film and author of the 1971 source novel, has stated that his aim was to terrify an increasingly secularised American audience back into faith. The Exorcist: Believer, though, does only what so many of the sequels, spinoffs, ripoffs and parodies have done: closely crib the original’s more sensationalist tropes while missing Friedkin’s sincerity and soulfulness in grappling with genuine theological cruces.
A postmodern, pick-and-mix approach to the world’s religions serves to dilute this requel’s message further, as though belief – or the viewer’s hoped-for suspension of disbelief – is an end in itself, without need for context or even God. Here the demonic seems to be just life’s bad shit, and the divine providence that ex-nun Ann comes to recognise in the film’s confluence of events is reducible to script contrivance. Far from converting viewers, this merely cashes in on their backward-looking nostalgia, without moving forward to anything better, or even half as good.
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ANTICIPATION.
Love The Exorcist, but the sequels… yeesh… 3
ENJOYMENT.
A hell of confused callbacks. 2
IN RETROSPECT.
Nostalgia will not save you. 2
Directed by
David Gordon Green
Starring
Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Nettles, Leslie Odom Jr
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