(from left) Angela Fielding (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia Marcum) in The Exorcist: Believer, directed by David Gordon Green. (Universal Pictures)
🎞️ When is The Exorcist: Believer out in cinemas: 6 October, 2023
⭐️ Our rating: 2/5
🎭 Who’s in it? Leslie Odom Jr., Ellen Burstyn, Lidya, Jewett, Olivia Marcum.
👍 What we liked: The film has some effective jump scares.
👎 What we didn’t: While it does a decent job of bringing a possession film to the big screen the film isn’t very memorable, or all that interesting despite being a horror film.
📖 What’s it about? When friends Angela and Katherine return home three days after disappearing in the woods something about the young girls is different, and their families go to great lengths to save them from eternal damnation.
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist was a turning point for horror, redefining what the genre could do by bringing a grotesque yet terrifyingly thrilling story to the big screen, and now director David Gordon Green is hoping to do the same with The Exorcist: Believer.
A sequel to the original, and set 50 years after Regan’s possession, The Exorcist: Believer follows father Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) who raises his daughter alone following his wife’s death during the events of the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
Read more: How making The Exorcist was scarier than the movie itself
He promised his wife to protect Angela (Lidya Jewett), so when she goes missing with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) and returns three days later and acting strange Victor will do whatever he can to save her, including turning to Regan’s mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) for help with ridding the two girls of the demonic entities possessing them.
Ellen Burstyn and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Chris MacNeil and Victor Fielding in The Exorcist: Believer, which sees Chris help the father of a young girl possessed by demons like her daughter Regan was (Universal Pictures)
Following up a movie as iconic as The Exorcist was always going to be difficult, and Green tries to do Friedkin’s work justice with this follow-up which features all the hallmarks of the original and pays homage to the legacy of Regan and Chris.
The film does a decent job with its premise, getting us invested into Victor and Angela’s story so that we are emotionally connected to them and their story particularly when Angela and Katherine’s possession kicks into high gear. The problem is that the film just isn’t all that exciting, or very scary.
Perhaps because we had The Exorcist before, and dozens of similar possession films since, it is hard for this sequel to find any way to be distinct. As it stands, The Exorcist: Believer is a very middle of the road horror movie, hitting the right cues but capturing none of the magic of the original.
Linda Blair as Regan in The Exorcist, the original film directed by William Friedkin and released in 1973 (Warner Bros)
There are some jump scares that work effectively but most fall flat, and the ultimate exorcism attempt feels surprisingly muted despite the life-or-death nature of the narrative at that point in the narrative.
Read more: Actors who were injured on Oscar-winning movies
Odom Jr. and Jewett give strong performances as father and daughter, though, and it is Victor’s journey as a father still struggling with his grief that helps keep the movie together.
Director David Gordon Green on the set of The Exorcist: Believer. (Universal Pictures)
The movie also does well in highlighting other types of faith systems, including ones of African origin, to give a more modern take on the exorcist genre.
The Exorcist will always be remembered as one of the scariest films ever made but its sequel can’t hold a candle to its predecessor and, at the end of the day, is barely memorable.
The Exorcist: Believer will be released in cinemas on Friday, 6 October.
Watch: A featurette for The Exorcist: Believer:
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