The David Gordon Green-ified first part of a trilogy requeling The Exorcist officially opened today. It avoided the Swift-pocalypse. I realize these are horrible sentences with awful words for anyone to be writing or reading, so thank you for bearing with me.

I want you to know that I came close to liking The Exorcist: Believer, but it had way too many weaknesses.

It’s still better than Exorcist: The Beginning though. SPOILERS

The Exorcist: Believer (2023)
Writer(s): Peter Sattler, David Gordon Green

Director: David Gordon Green

Notable Cast: Leslie Odom, Jr., Ellen Burstyn, Ann Dowd,

Plot: In this sequel to the 1973 demonic possession juggernaut, two young girls go missing only to be found 3 days later, suffering from what can only be possession by an evil spirit. Will Chris MacNeil be able to help the distraught families?

The saddest part of what’s sure to be a fiasco for Blumhouse and David Gordon Green is the very technical ways in which this film has failed. That would be primarily in the writing and the editing.

Let’s start with the severely underwritten characters. The Exorcist and Exorcist III never shied away from letting its characters breathe, giving us the necessary amount of time getting to know them, and giving us tangential slice-of-life moments that only make the movies richer. Perhaps only Leslie Odom, Jr. (as Victor Fielding) and Lidya Jewett (as his daughter Angela Fielding, one of the two possession victims) get anything close to this in the movie. I did enjoy their performances.

I also liked Olivia Marcum as Katherine, Angela’s friend, partner in occult dabbling, and fellow possession victim (both girls were coached and protected by Linda Blair as a consultant to the movie, which is lovely). But Katherine’s parents, her family and her life were reduced to the most bizarrely cartoonish satirical stereotypes of white evangelicals. I am only now noticing that the family wasn’t even given a last name? If the point to that is social commentary it fails very hard.

The poor writing also extended to many of the peripheral characters. Ann Dowd is an ex-novice nun with an eye-rolling secret shame about abortion. Again, is this social commentary? Meh. Dowd is terrific but how much can she do with a character whose whole purpose is set up in such an expository manner?

We have an inter-faith Justice League of exorcists that includes Dowd, a Baptist preacher (Raphael Sbarge), a weird family-friend Pentecostal preacher/boxing coach (Danny McCarthy) who has an unlikely friendship with a Hoodoo root doctor (Okwui Okpokwasili; pretty much the most powerful of this bunch), and a Catholic priest (E.J. Bonilla) who gets busy exorcising despite Church officials saying “nope,” and (HEAVY SPOILER) who demonstrates what actually happens to any human being trying a 360 degree head spin.

All these characters are just there, not actual characters but a checklist of religious traditions. Not necessarily a bad thing but any serious attempt at an Exorcist legacy sequel would have given these characters some sort of inner life and complicated relationship to what was around them.

Then there is what’s surely the biggest draw for fans: the return of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil.

I’m thrilled to see Ms. Burstyn return and applaud her for getting that sweet Blumhouse cash and putting it towards her worthy projects. But nowhere is the terrible writing more evident than in Chris MacNeil 2023. Her dialogue is reduced to empty speechifying about ‘community’ with a social commentary jab at the Catholic Church (I am not in the least opposed to this viewpoint but it’s a throwaway that makes no sense for the character). And bafflingly, she’s not only given exorcism powers, she’s also the victim of the movie’s schlockiest, most nonsensical bit of traditional horror movie violence, meant to cue the infamous crucifix scene.

In a parallel to the TV series adaptation of The Exorcist, Chris MacNeill wrote a book about her experience which caused Regan to cut off all contact with her and disappear from her life. I don’t understand or like this development for 1973’s character, who worked incredibly hard to protect her beloved daughter from the effects and fallout of her possession. I’d like to hear arguments to the contrary from anyone reading this.

Who edited this? Who decided on the pacing of the film? It’s abysmal. So rushed, it made me wonder if the studio execs were screaming behind the scenes “KIDS TODAY HAVE NO ATTENTION SPAN! GET TO THE PUKE!” This made the movie so empty. Scenes that could and should have played for a strong emotional impact just zip by with no transitions when cutting to the next. There’s no way to become interested in these characters, or to even develop a growing sense of creep and dread. Why? The Exorcist brand is about evil creeping into the everyday, quotidian rhythm of life.

Positives: aside from the aforementioned performances, it was nice cinematography, and I was surprised at how good the opening sequence in Haiti was. I was a bit apprehensive about the use of Haitian Vodoun and its cousin traditions. Victor’s wife receives a blessing from a practitioner; and earthquake ensues. And trash like Pat Robertson certainly think the two are related. But it ended up okay, and in fact the character of Dr. Beehibe (Okpokwasili) was if nothing else, a compelling presence.

You can see interviews with David Gordon Green where he states how much he admires the scene in the original, where Lt. Kinderman visits with Chris MacNeil. Now imagine if that scene was stripped of its lingering tension, its body language nuance, its secret war of wills between the two characters, and turned into a didactic 30 second interrogation with an over dramatic background score. That’s The Exorcist: Believer.

Still: carry on, DGG and Blumhouse. You committed to it, lets see it through to the end. What else have you got?