Get thee behind me
Regardless of whether or not I should, in the year of our Lord 2023, want to extend any benefit of the doubt to director David Gordon Green, I cannot help but wish to, and in the case of his 16th feature, The Exorcist: Believer, the extension I would make is this: early in the film, two 13-year-old girls, Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia O'Neill), have just completely vanished off the face of the earth. They wandered into the woods in suburban Georgia after school and left not a solitary trace of their passing. It is a local crisis, one that sends Angela's widower father Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and Katherine's parents Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) into a desperate frenzy and whips up the community into a state of high alert. And here, for several moments, Green paints a portrait of a tight little society that is simultaneously going about its business as usual while also freezing in its tracks, a society that is distinctly Georgian and even more distinctly inflected by an ambient Southern Baptist moral sensibility, and in that little scrap of time, I could remember. How, once upon a time, less than a quarter of a century ago, Green was (to me) maybe the most exciting young filmmaker in the United States of America, having made a towering success with his 2000 feature debut George Washington, a graceful slice-of-life coming-of-age story that had an indescribably clear-eyed sense of place and culture and a whole manner of living in the world. And how his next couple of movies swirled around in the same mode, observational and regionally precise but artful enough to remain free of the limiting shackles of aesthetic realism. For those few minutes of The Exorcist: Believer, he got back there. It feels warm and true. I was moved and excited by it.
That's pretty much the end of the list of things about Believer that I respected much at all. A franchise that has, to date, included both 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic and 2004's Exorcist: The Beginning has made it just absolutely ludicrously hard to make an end-run for the title of "worst in the series", and Believer doesn't even slightly threaten to do so, but it's still pretty lousy. It's especially frustrating because in the wake of 2021's Halloween Kills and 2022's Halloween Ends, I think it is safe to say that making decades-later sequels to groundbreaking, genre-defining horror films from the 1970s, bringing back the beloved actress who gave one of her most iconic and celebrated performances in that horror film after she already sat out several sequels on principle is a specific task that we already know to a certainty that Green cannot be trusted with. I think you could go so far as to argue that of all the professional movie directors working at the time that Universal and Blumhouse were looking to put somebody in charge of their very expensive baby (Believer cost a fairly trim $30 million, but the rights to The Exorcist as a brand name cost Universal an unrecoverable $400 million), Green might have been the most demonstrably bad choice.
But he got the Exorcist job regardless and that leaves the rest of us stuck with the latest attempt to follow-up the indescribably iconic 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist: either the fourth or fifth, depending on how you want to count the two competing prequels, The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. These have all been doomed, in part because The Exorcist represented a constellation of talent that you simply cannot call up on demand whenever you feel like it. But also, and more pragmatically, what could conceivably be the need to keep trying to make Exorcist movies? The Exorcist might very well be the single most-frequently ripped-off movie ever made, and unlike the other most obvious candidates for that title (Jaws, Dawn of the Dead), the rip-offs were more on the order of out-and-out clones. Basically every movie with a demonic possession that requires a purification ritual (especially the Roman Catholic rite of exorcism) that has been made in the last half-century has just followed the exact formula set down by William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty in 1973, and particularly, the act of that film dedicated to the exorcism itself has had its staging and rhythms precisely replicated by a number of films that I can't even begin to imagine counting. So what would possibly be the job of an actual, official sequel? There have already been something like several hundred unofficial sequels and remakes.
The Exorcist: Believer seems to have dimly realised this, so what Green and his co-writers have done (the story was by Green & Scott Teems & Danny McBride; the script was by Green & Peter Sattler) is twofold: first, they've given us two possessed adolescent girls (Angela and Katherine turn up in a barn after three days, and Miranda figures out pretty quickly that they're possessed by malevolent forces from Hell), rather than the standard one. And instead of just having Catholic exorcists, they've shoved a whole damn "COEXIST" bumper sticker's worth of religious and spiritual practitioners in there. Which is really just missing the point in such a profound way that I really cannot understand what other than actual, genuine malice could have motivated it; the movie feels like it was written by humanists, and I certainly don't think that humanists should be prohibited from writing movies, but I think there's a real argument to be made that they should be prohibited from writing movies in the Exorcist series. They should probably also be prohibited from writing movies about Baptists, given that the film seems to honestly believe that Baptist faith is the more-or-less exclusive provenance of white conservatives. In Georgia.
The other thing that the writers have done to try and freshen up this most stale of all horror narratives is to find a space in the narrative where they could shove Chris MacNeil, who as a single mother in 1973 stood by helplessly while her daughter was possessed by a demon named Pazuzu, and who could do nothing but hope and pray as two Catholic priests tried to drive the demon out. This led her to write a book, and at some point that book was ready by the former novitiate Ann (Ann Dowd), who is the nurse attending to Angela after the girl is admitted to the hospital with inexplicable burns and convulsions and whatnot. And Ann suggests that Victor should find Chris and look her up. As elegant solutions for bringing legacy characters back into the fold go, this is about as graceful as a hippo on roller skates. But it's what the brain trust could come up with, and then they found a huge pile of money to dump in front of Ellen Burstyn, the one main cast member to steadily refuse to show up for any of the sequels, while Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, Jason Miller, and Kitty Winn all caved in at some point or another (Lee J. Cobb was lucky enough to have died before the first sequel went into production). To her attenuated credit, Burstyn has not hidden the fact that she thought this was a stupid idea and only took the job so she could funnel her large payday into her charitable foundation. She's also working to pretend that the incredibly lazy and trivial bullshit that Chris MacNeil is handed in her brief appearance (my guess would be around seven minutes, less if we don't count voiceover) is remotely convincing either as dialogue or behavior. It's really impressive, given how little Burstyn is actually given to do, that so much of it is unbelievable doggerel: she has one dialogue scene where she delivers this incredibly forced Twitter-poisoned line about the patriarchy, she has a V.O. monologue that sums up the film's pudding-headed ecumenism in the most tacky, bromidic language, and is I think a strong candidate for the single worst scene in Exorcist history, and she is the recipient of a pointlessly shocking attack by the demon-possessed Angela that is noteworthy for being just about the only attempt to do something actually scary and violent in this ostensible horror movie, and also speaks to the unbelievably craven cynicism in having hauled Chris MacNeil out of mothballs, just to they can thoroughly besmirch the character's dignity by having her pratfall into a jump scare.
That being said, outside of the hollow stupidity of getting Burstyn back just to mortify her, the opening two-thirds of The Exorcist: Believer are... well, they're bad, but in a fairly leaden, mediocre way, not anything fancy in its offensive excess. For someone who has redefined himself as a horror director, Green has absolutely no acumen for staging scares nor for letting moody, heavy atmosphere coalesce; he can only frogmarch the two young actors playing the possessed girls through some pretty generic "profane" material, while the adults look on with monotonous confusion. Cinematographer Michael Simmonds, who collaborated with Green on the Halloween pictures, has even less acumen; this is one of the clearest examples I have seen of the bad habit plaguing contemporary American horror, the belief that the way you make scenes look dark is to simply not light them, rather than the correct approach, which is to light them to have small patches of light while throwing deep black shadows everywhere. It is routinely impossible to see literally anything other than an impression of movement. So it's dull crap at best, though Dowd is treating us to a relatively complex character in her small appearance.
Once the action hits the third-act exorcism, though, all bets are off. It is baffling how poorly the exorcism scene is executed here. That's the one part you shouldn't be able to fuck up! There is maybe no scene in modern horror cinema more typical than an exorcism, all you have to is follow the narrative beats, using the same blocking and shot scales, with the same jerky camera movements, as dozens upon dozens and dozens of movies staging the same scene back over the last 50 years. And I guess maybe it's because the filmmakers know it's all lazy clichés, they try to get fancy with it. And it's horrible. There's the thing where several different faith traditions are all trying to exorcise simultaneously, which leads to a busy clutter of characters shoved into a room where, practically by definition, the camera will be whipping around in short, tight cuts. In a late attempt to retroactively shovel some character work into this terribly generic script, we get two huge twists right in a row. And I think they're meant to comment upon each other, but they just make things feel arbitrary and frankly rather aggressively pointless, in the case of the second twist. Plus, the tone gets so sour and mean here that the very quick attempt to shift into some kind of solemnly peaceful vibe for the film's last couple of minutes falls absolutely flat. It honestly takes some ambition and creativity to muck something so formulaic up this bad. So congrats the filmmaking team, I guess: they might have made some utter, contemptible trash, but at least it's not lazy trash.
Reviews in this series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)
The Exorcist: Believer (Green, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
That's pretty much the end of the list of things about Believer that I respected much at all. A franchise that has, to date, included both 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic and 2004's Exorcist: The Beginning has made it just absolutely ludicrously hard to make an end-run for the title of "worst in the series", and Believer doesn't even slightly threaten to do so, but it's still pretty lousy. It's especially frustrating because in the wake of 2021's Halloween Kills and 2022's Halloween Ends, I think it is safe to say that making decades-later sequels to groundbreaking, genre-defining horror films from the 1970s, bringing back the beloved actress who gave one of her most iconic and celebrated performances in that horror film after she already sat out several sequels on principle is a specific task that we already know to a certainty that Green cannot be trusted with. I think you could go so far as to argue that of all the professional movie directors working at the time that Universal and Blumhouse were looking to put somebody in charge of their very expensive baby (Believer cost a fairly trim $30 million, but the rights to The Exorcist as a brand name cost Universal an unrecoverable $400 million), Green might have been the most demonstrably bad choice.
But he got the Exorcist job regardless and that leaves the rest of us stuck with the latest attempt to follow-up the indescribably iconic 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist: either the fourth or fifth, depending on how you want to count the two competing prequels, The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. These have all been doomed, in part because The Exorcist represented a constellation of talent that you simply cannot call up on demand whenever you feel like it. But also, and more pragmatically, what could conceivably be the need to keep trying to make Exorcist movies? The Exorcist might very well be the single most-frequently ripped-off movie ever made, and unlike the other most obvious candidates for that title (Jaws, Dawn of the Dead), the rip-offs were more on the order of out-and-out clones. Basically every movie with a demonic possession that requires a purification ritual (especially the Roman Catholic rite of exorcism) that has been made in the last half-century has just followed the exact formula set down by William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty in 1973, and particularly, the act of that film dedicated to the exorcism itself has had its staging and rhythms precisely replicated by a number of films that I can't even begin to imagine counting. So what would possibly be the job of an actual, official sequel? There have already been something like several hundred unofficial sequels and remakes.
The Exorcist: Believer seems to have dimly realised this, so what Green and his co-writers have done (the story was by Green & Scott Teems & Danny McBride; the script was by Green & Peter Sattler) is twofold: first, they've given us two possessed adolescent girls (Angela and Katherine turn up in a barn after three days, and Miranda figures out pretty quickly that they're possessed by malevolent forces from Hell), rather than the standard one. And instead of just having Catholic exorcists, they've shoved a whole damn "COEXIST" bumper sticker's worth of religious and spiritual practitioners in there. Which is really just missing the point in such a profound way that I really cannot understand what other than actual, genuine malice could have motivated it; the movie feels like it was written by humanists, and I certainly don't think that humanists should be prohibited from writing movies, but I think there's a real argument to be made that they should be prohibited from writing movies in the Exorcist series. They should probably also be prohibited from writing movies about Baptists, given that the film seems to honestly believe that Baptist faith is the more-or-less exclusive provenance of white conservatives. In Georgia.
The other thing that the writers have done to try and freshen up this most stale of all horror narratives is to find a space in the narrative where they could shove Chris MacNeil, who as a single mother in 1973 stood by helplessly while her daughter was possessed by a demon named Pazuzu, and who could do nothing but hope and pray as two Catholic priests tried to drive the demon out. This led her to write a book, and at some point that book was ready by the former novitiate Ann (Ann Dowd), who is the nurse attending to Angela after the girl is admitted to the hospital with inexplicable burns and convulsions and whatnot. And Ann suggests that Victor should find Chris and look her up. As elegant solutions for bringing legacy characters back into the fold go, this is about as graceful as a hippo on roller skates. But it's what the brain trust could come up with, and then they found a huge pile of money to dump in front of Ellen Burstyn, the one main cast member to steadily refuse to show up for any of the sequels, while Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, Jason Miller, and Kitty Winn all caved in at some point or another (Lee J. Cobb was lucky enough to have died before the first sequel went into production). To her attenuated credit, Burstyn has not hidden the fact that she thought this was a stupid idea and only took the job so she could funnel her large payday into her charitable foundation. She's also working to pretend that the incredibly lazy and trivial bullshit that Chris MacNeil is handed in her brief appearance (my guess would be around seven minutes, less if we don't count voiceover) is remotely convincing either as dialogue or behavior. It's really impressive, given how little Burstyn is actually given to do, that so much of it is unbelievable doggerel: she has one dialogue scene where she delivers this incredibly forced Twitter-poisoned line about the patriarchy, she has a V.O. monologue that sums up the film's pudding-headed ecumenism in the most tacky, bromidic language, and is I think a strong candidate for the single worst scene in Exorcist history, and she is the recipient of a pointlessly shocking attack by the demon-possessed Angela that is noteworthy for being just about the only attempt to do something actually scary and violent in this ostensible horror movie, and also speaks to the unbelievably craven cynicism in having hauled Chris MacNeil out of mothballs, just to they can thoroughly besmirch the character's dignity by having her pratfall into a jump scare.
That being said, outside of the hollow stupidity of getting Burstyn back just to mortify her, the opening two-thirds of The Exorcist: Believer are... well, they're bad, but in a fairly leaden, mediocre way, not anything fancy in its offensive excess. For someone who has redefined himself as a horror director, Green has absolutely no acumen for staging scares nor for letting moody, heavy atmosphere coalesce; he can only frogmarch the two young actors playing the possessed girls through some pretty generic "profane" material, while the adults look on with monotonous confusion. Cinematographer Michael Simmonds, who collaborated with Green on the Halloween pictures, has even less acumen; this is one of the clearest examples I have seen of the bad habit plaguing contemporary American horror, the belief that the way you make scenes look dark is to simply not light them, rather than the correct approach, which is to light them to have small patches of light while throwing deep black shadows everywhere. It is routinely impossible to see literally anything other than an impression of movement. So it's dull crap at best, though Dowd is treating us to a relatively complex character in her small appearance.
Once the action hits the third-act exorcism, though, all bets are off. It is baffling how poorly the exorcism scene is executed here. That's the one part you shouldn't be able to fuck up! There is maybe no scene in modern horror cinema more typical than an exorcism, all you have to is follow the narrative beats, using the same blocking and shot scales, with the same jerky camera movements, as dozens upon dozens and dozens of movies staging the same scene back over the last 50 years. And I guess maybe it's because the filmmakers know it's all lazy clichés, they try to get fancy with it. And it's horrible. There's the thing where several different faith traditions are all trying to exorcise simultaneously, which leads to a busy clutter of characters shoved into a room where, practically by definition, the camera will be whipping around in short, tight cuts. In a late attempt to retroactively shovel some character work into this terribly generic script, we get two huge twists right in a row. And I think they're meant to comment upon each other, but they just make things feel arbitrary and frankly rather aggressively pointless, in the case of the second twist. Plus, the tone gets so sour and mean here that the very quick attempt to shift into some kind of solemnly peaceful vibe for the film's last couple of minutes falls absolutely flat. It honestly takes some ambition and creativity to muck something so formulaic up this bad. So congrats the filmmaking team, I guess: they might have made some utter, contemptible trash, but at least it's not lazy trash.
Reviews in this series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)
The Exorcist: Believer (Green, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
