The Exorcist: Believer was released by Blumhouse on October 6th and is the 6th film in The Exorcist franchise. After the new Halloween trilogy that began in 2018, This is director David Gordon Green’s second swing at reviving a beloved horror franchise. The film was originally slated to be released on October 13th, but was moved ahead one week to avoid competing with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. Now, this should have been a clear sign of The Exorcist: Believer’s quality. Why would a studio be worried about a horror movie competing with a Taylor Swift concert film? Obviously there will always be viewers who are interested in both of these films, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the general audiences for The Exorcist: Believer and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour don’t cross over too much. In the past, studios have had little worry about this kind of thing. Studios always seem to worry very little about a horror film competing with a romantic comedy for example. So why were they worried about this? My sneaking suspicion is that the studio isn’t truly worried about The Eras Tour siphoning audiences away from The Exorcist: Believer, they’re just worried about people seeing The Exorcist: Believer AT ALL. They didn’t want the film to compete against anything let alone Taylor Swift. Now, after seeing The Exorcist: Believer, I understand why. Now, before I begin, I want to say that this movie isn’t as awful as other critics or my former introduction might suggest. The biggest failure here is that it gets so many seemingly obvious things wrong. And this is from someone who is not a franchise gatekeeper of any kind. More specifically, it’s about this movie falling into genre cliches and pitfalls that should have easily been avoided. With the film’s budget, the 400 million dollars spent on trilogy rights, and the massive hype around returning characters, you’d think they would have put an equal amount of care into the script. This film would cause less of an uproar if it didn’t have such a big franchise name and so much general hype attached to it. 

The script comes from the writing team David Gordon Green, Scott Teems (Halloween Kills, Insidious: The Red Door), and Peter Sattler (Camp X-Ray) and I unfortunately wonder if the three really understand what is appealing about even some of the worst Exorcist films. To me, and I’m guessing a large majority of audiences, The Exorcist films are about displaying the horrors of faith, but then reaffirming the faith through that same horror. Here’s the thing: They do display this theme, but it’s completely out of balance. They display the reaffirmation of faith, but that aspect feels like it severely outweighs the horrific elements. In a horror movie, especially an Exorcist movie, I’m not too keen on walking out of the theater feeling like I just attended a sermon. I want to walk out uncomfortable, scared, disturbed, and just barely be able to spot a sliver of hope tucked between the horror. This film fails at bringing the necessary existential scares, which makes the reaffirmation of faith element seem cheesy and unearned. 

The film stars Leslie Odom Jr. as Victor, a single father who seemingly cares more about his daughter than anything; Lidya Jewett as Anglea, his possessed daughter; Olivia O’Neil as Katherine, Angela’s also possessed best friend; and Ann Dowd as Victor’s next door neighbor. Rounding out the cast are Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz as Katherine’s parents as well as E.J. Bonilla as the mandated pastor character. Not that I forgot, but the film also stars Ellen Burstyn reprising her role of Chris MacNeil from the original Exorcist film. I mention her apart from the rest of the cast to address one of the biggest issues with the film: The use of Chris MacNeil. Her character is only used briefly and it’s not specifically her scenes that are the issue, it’s the fact that any story revolving around her character has zero connection to the main plot of the film. Her story feels like a completely separate story that quite frankly feels out of place. There are some feeble attempts to thematically tie her struggles into the struggles of the main character, but they feel surface level at best. At most it feels akin to a conversation like: “You wear green? Well I wear green too! How about that?” 

The two possessed girls do fine in their roles with the necessary manic energy coming through, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the rubber-looking prosthetics that cake their faces. I didn’t mind their demon dialogue as much as some viewers, it wasn’t blow you out of the water crazy, but it did the job of being effective enough in the way that the original is.

Ann Dowd is always amazing but unfortunately she seems to be stuck with the worst dialogue the film has to offer. Her skill makes some of it work when it shouldn’t, but even a shoe shiner can only do so much to polish a turd. The rest of the cast is serviceable but sometimes fall into caricatures that are a real bore. 

The film has a great early set-up and succeeds in getting the audience on board. Interesting questions are raised and the tone is established well. The film really comes to a halt once Chris’ character is reintroduced. It’s not that any of Chris’ story is particularly bad, it just feels like starting over after 45 minutes of set up. And this is even more boring in hindsight considering the nonexistent connections Chris’ story has to the primary story. The film picks up again in the third act with a particularly nasty death and actually succeeds in having a few effective reveals to mysteries raised earlier in the story. The climax ends with the perfect balance of horror, sacrifice, earned emotion, and the reaffirmation of faith. Unfortunately, the film then immediately upends this with an uplifting epilogue scene that recalls the worst part of the original where they do the same. Although, where the original’s felt solemn, this one feels uplifting in an exhausting and silly sense. It completely eliminates any horror that the audience could’ve walked out with. It feels like a truly studio mandated ending that feels to me like a betrayal of the disturbing tone that the movie should have ended on. I’ve never felt so sickened by such an uplifting ending. It was truly out of place. 

Overall, the movie is not a complete disaster, but it is an extremely large disappointment. You can come out of this film having a good time if you’re partial to exorcism films and your expectations are set accordingly. The entire revival of this from its inception promised something new and exciting, but instead we received a sequel filled with cliches of other exorcism films that were themselves knock offs of the original Exorcist film. In a way it feels like a double retread and that’s the last thing I wanted to come out of the theater saying about the first Exorcist film in almost 20 years. C–