'The Exorcist: Believer' Spoiler-Free Review
Image Source: JoBlo
The latest trend of the late 2010s and early 2020s has been legacy sequels, e.g. sequels that take place long after the events of the original film, with appearances of the classic characters, and often just ignoring the previous thirty sequels. The most well-known example of this was the 2018 remake of Halloween. When it was announced that there would be a legacy sequel to the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist, nobody went in with very high expectations. What could they really do?
Not much, as it turns out.
To be completely fair to the film, it was behind the eight-ball from the start. The Exorcist is one of the most influential films ever, not just in the horror genre. The amazing part is that all of the scary and disturbing aspects of the film still very much hold up today. It’s as scary and disturbing now as it was back in 1973. It was the first horror film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Nothing The Exorcist: Believer did could ever compare to the original film, and I don’t think the filmmakers were trying for that.
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Believer doesn’t feel like an Exorcist film. Sure it has a lot of the usual stuff that you’d find in an Exorcist film, and there are one or two nice nods to the original, but there’s barely anything in it that would make it stand out from the other hundred demon possession films that the original film inspired. If you said that it was a sequel to a film like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, that would be more believable.
Given that this is a legacy sequel, how does it treat its main legacy character, Chris MacNeil? Not very well at all. You could have cut her role to a few phone calls and not missed too much. Plus some of her lines are eye-rolling and groan-inducing. She blames the fact that she wasn’t allowed into the room during Regan’s exorcism on The Patriarchy (barf) and not the fact that she was an atheist whom Pazuzu would spend the entire exorcism trying to hurt and emotionally manipulate. Her comment also minimizes the two men who, you know, died freeing her daughter. She does and says a lot of moronic stuff in the film, thus continuing the tradition of these legacy sequels not respecting their characters.
Image Source: digitalspy
That’s a minor point, though. How are the characters in this film? Pretty hit-and-miss. This time instead of one girl possessed, you have two of them. We spend the movie following one of them, so we’re emotionally involved, but she’s more of a plot device in the film than a character. The protagonist father is the best character in the film, which is good. He does have some great character moments that add a lot of drama to the film.
The movie as a whole is well made. All of the actors are doing their best, and the story is an interesting one. This wasn’t a lazily made film, it just failed in execution, and it didn’t do a single thing to make it stand out from the hundred other films inspired by the original Exorcist. If the filmmakers wanted to make it a part of The Conjuring universe, they could do that and change almost nothing.
It is almost unfair to compare it to the original, even though it’s a direct sequel. It was never going to match the power and legacy of that film. No amount of special effects will match the “power of Christ compels you” scene. It’s overall cliche, competent, and trying to be better than it is. This is one Halloween season film worth skipping.
Rating: 4/10
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