When two girls disappear into the woods and return three days later with no memory of what happened to them, the father of one girl seeks out Chris MacNeil, who's been forever altered by what happened to her daughter fifty years ago. Marketed as a direct follow up to William Friedkin’s 1973 horror genre game changer The Exorcist, David Gordon Green of the recent Halloween sequel trilogy takes up the directing job for this film. I only recently watched the original Exorcist film for my first time this past week, so I went in to this sequel pretty optimistic that it would at least be a good spooky time in October. It doesn’t exactly shock me to say that The Exorcist: Believer is a prime example of a cheap Hollywood money grab. The synopsis at the beginning of this review sounds fairly intriguing, almost like the log-line of a promising legacy sequel that builds upon the original and stands on its own. Such isn’t the case with this bland, overlong, and soulless exercise in vanilla modern horror movies cliches.
The entire first hour is a snooze, with the two parents of the missing girls trying to figure out what caused their children to forget three unaccounted for days of absence. I guess it does not help whatsoever that it was hard to understand what characters were saying during this time period. Not sure whether it was the sound mixing or sound projection in the theater, but either way, I wasn’t hooked. It covers a lot of the same basic story beats of the first film, only this time, there is no sense of atmosphere, tension or mystery that made the set up of the original so effective. The movie falls into almost all of the same traps that have plagued a good amount of bad nostalgia bait sequels. None of the new characters are interesting or bring any real nuance to the story. The acting isn’t bad per se, and Leslie Odom Jr. as widower/father of one of the possessed girls does a pretty good job with what he’s given, but the problem is that even his “religious skeptic” character goes through a predictable arc that we’ve seen a million times before.
The makeup and practical effects are undeniably impressive and more “scary looking” than they were in the original, but this doesn’t change the fact that the third act heavily relies on CGI and familiar possession horror scenarios that just don’t frighten me anymore. Going back to the synopsis, one would think that Ellen Burstyn’s iconic character Chris MacNeil from the original film would play a significant role in this movie. Hate to break it to whoever is reading this, but I don’t even think Ellen has more than 8 minutes of screen time and her actual role has little impact on the overall story. There are a couple of interesting moments with Chris explaining events that have transpired since the first movie, unfortunately after this exposition dump, she gets shortchanged in a remarkably lazy narrative choice that sidelines her character for the rest of the movie. The movie does make an attempt to focus on themes of a united community getting through traumatic situations together, but in this process, it simultaneously loses sight of being the horror movie it should be. There are only a few moments that elicited some kind of scare factor and even then, I was already emotionally checked out of the movie.
This is one of those instances where a film looks really good on paper, in theory, and conceptually, but is let down by execution as flavorful as a cardboard box. Running at 2 hours, the majority of the films plays like a missing persons movie with the occasional possession scene sprinkled in. That would be fine if I cared at all about any of the characters or felt any terror during the possession sequences, but neither is the case. For a 2023 rated R demonic possession movie, the scares are far too polished and tame, with little effort made to crank up the visceral violence or horrific nature of the situations. Green does his best to make the film visually interesting, but there is absolutely nothing new brought to the table here. I really can’t think of more to say about this movie other than the fact that it’s definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the movies I’ve ever seen. Overall, David Gordon Green tries his best to revive the Exorcist franchise in a sequel that is riddled with overdone horror movie tropes, forgettable new characters, a puzzling misuse of Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil, and a bizarre lack of atmospheric tension or genuine scares.
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