Horror legacy sequels are all the rage since David Gordon Green broke the bank with his trilogy of Halloween sequels that erased the timelines of previous films and opted to follow up the classic Carpenter film by re-examining Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode heroine. They were huge financial hits if critically mixed among fans and critics alike. Since then, the horror terrain has seen a recent crop of films trying to drudge up the main leads of their original classics to totalize fans and cash in on a fad.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) is the most tiresome form of this trend. The Scream films fare better by modernizing the foundations while incorporating the original films’ main (or last surviving) characters to bridge the gap between the 90s and current slasher horror tropes. How far will Hollywood go to force legacy sequels that wring out fans’ nostalgia while masquerading as flimsy efforts by adding weak substance to make them appear meaningful?
Turns out they’ll go as far as the I.P. mine allows them. With Universal plopping a boggling $400 million for the rights to make three Exorcist films, David Gordon Green and company seem hellbent on attaching their trademark stench to one of the greatest horror films to come out of the Hollywood system.
Exorcist: Believer (2023) is another legacy sequel that tries to have its vomit-soaked cake both ways. It wants to revere the original William Friedkin classic with callbacks to lines and imagery, dragging the talented Ellen Burstyn for a thankless role. It also desires to touch on the modern-day notion of faith, religious practices, and how demons can exist in a world that broadcasts horrors by the minute. Green and co-writer Peter Sattler have no incisive inclination or motivation to speak on this matter, if only in passing to allude to any ideas that aren’t borrowed from the original. Believer is the first of a trilogy, but the foundations are so barren and wafer-think that it quickly crumbles as the film seems more interested in constant jump-scares and thrills that are rote and bland.
The film opens with a literal fake-out jolt, as the first frame is of two dogs fighting each other (remember when they did that in the original?) on a beach in Haiti. Victor Fielding (Leslie Odum Jr.) and his pregnant wife quickly get caught in the middle of the 2010 earthquake, and after a severe injury, Victor must choose to save his wife or his unborn daughter. Cut to 13 years later, Victor and his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), live a tranquil suburban life. Victor is nervous and overprotective of his child and even hesitates to allow her to stay at a friend’s house after school.
Angela and her friend, Katherine (Olivia O’Neil), go to the woods after school one day and suddenly are missing. Victor and Katherine’s god-fearing Catholic-worshiping parents, Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz), set their distrust of each other aside and unite to find their daughters. Three days later, they’re found but exhibit disturbing behaviors and do not remember the ordeal. After troubling events involving Sunday worship and an assaultive breakfast, Angela and Katherine are hospitalized, with their parents helpless and not understanding what is wrong.
Victor’s annoying neighbor, Paula (Ann Dowd), is a nurse treating Angela. She realizes this is far beyond what medical science can explain and turns Victor to a more spiritual path through meeting with Chis MacNeil. MacNeil is now a lonely mother. Having written a book about her experiences, her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), has cut off ties with her mother, and her whereabouts are unknown. The quick pace and the contrived narrative culminate in an Avengers-style showdown as the two families and different religious leaders gather in a house, strapping the two girls back-to-back (as they seem tethered by their synchronized heart rates) and perform an unauthorized exorcism to expel whatever demon(s) lay dormant.
In standard horror fashion, what made the original Exorcist film effective was not the gnarly imagery or the spectacle of 1970s spectacle; it was Friedkin’s control of the camera and his actors. Believer desperately wants to comment on the divided America, where a secular nation is on the downward trajectory of faith. Houses of worship are on a decline in attendance. Younger people opt for more spiritual practices and less established dogmatic practices that have plunged the country into meaningless wars and far more meaningless conflicts with our neighbors.
All Believer can muster is a faint whisper on doubting faith in times of personal crisis, internalizing grief through rationality. Victor struggles to acknowledge religion and faith, yet his reckoning with the devil is an afterthought. Believer’s notion of facing trauma and giving yourself to superstition is drowned out by typical possessed girl tropes such as screeching, hollering, yelling obscenities, self-harm, and eye-popping special effects that confused me as to where Green was trying to go. Katherine’s story is completely sidetracked. After her brief stint at her community’s church, she is left to deteriorate and mangle her body until it comes time to bring her in the third act for the dual exorcism battle.
The thinly constructed thematic is even more saturated as Green constantly calls back to the original. Re-creating iconic moments or repeating the same lines 50 years ago does nothing to deepen the legacy of The Exorcist. If anything, it reminds people just how deficient mainstream horror has become, that the bankrupt imaginations of David Gordon Green and Blumhouse are simply filtered dilutions of better films. Green is a better filmmaker than this film would lead one to believe, and it’s clear he has an affection for horror films, having dedicated the last five years to the genre. One can’t help but ask if he has his own original ideas for horror instead of co-opting other established ones to lend his perspective. Besides relying on quick cuts, jump scares, sudden thuds and jolts, his horror is surprisingly cheap, never respecting the audience to live and breathe within a scene but southpawing them with surprise scares.
The final exorcism is nicely shot and uniquely uses space and placement with each character, but the chilling atmosphere is all for naught. The finale is unearned in the face of characters who haven’t had the proper time to come to this decision. It’s equivalent if one googled “how to get rid of possession in your child,” and exorcism was the first result. It’s carelessly lazy in how the film arrives at this juncture; the parents seem more like set dressing than central figures grappling with their innocent daughters manipulated by forces more powerful than their parental love. Their agency is dictated by the outlines of a script that requires some emotional awakening, but they lack the foundations of that process.
Leslie Odum Jr. is a fine actor, and thankfully, the film focuses on his tormented widowed -father character who’s unable to come to terms with making a life-altering decision between his wife and unborn daughter. There is an unspoken pain that Odum manifests quite nicely amidst the possession antics and histrionics, and his subdued demeanor anchors the semblance of an emotional weight.
Ann Dowd continues her trajectory of being the best-supporting performance in any movie. Her Paula may be annoying and grumpy regarding misplaced trash cans, but she soon unearths a tragic past as she reconnects to her faith. Paula has love and consideration for Victor that comes to a focal point in which she feels her fate brought her to step up against the dark forces occupying these young girls’ bodies.
The two child actresses make best with the lack of screen time by allowing their transitions from vivacious, loveable children to face-ripped, body-flailing, hair-receded, discolored demonic eyesores, as the makeup design allows that tangible disgust classic possessed victims usually require.
Ellen Burstyn, at the age of 90, remains one of the most exemplary actors of her time. When so many legendary actors of her stature sadly pass away, she remains steadfast at never phoning in her performance. Prior to Believer, no Exorcist sequel managed to lure Burstyn to the franchise, as she wisely saw the writing on the wall and passed on the sequels. Her return as Chris MacNeil is a saddening cynical maneuver by the studio to inject any legitimacy into this underwritten horror sequel to stand out from its predecessors. One can see why Green wanted her to return, as the way her character is dealt with is bold in commenting that no one can overpower a force as malevolent as the devil and simply surviving one encounter (one in which she was absent the entire exorcism ritual) does not excuse you from harm. But Green doesn’t follow up on this, leaving Burstyn confined to a bed. Her reckoning with the devil is treated as a shock throwaway, thus rendering her little crumbs of an arc useless.
So why did she return? Burstyn has been on record that when Universal doubled their initial offer, she had to consider if this was “the devil asking my price.” She then agreed if, on top of the money, the offer would include a scholarship fund for her master’s program at Pace University. She got everything she asked. Perhaps there is a God—if one intrinsically good outcome can come from this film, then that’s better than what most legacy sequels can say for themselves.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to Universal Pictures via Variety
Recent Comments