Since the death of his wife 12 years ago, Victor Fielding has raised their daughter, Angela on his own. But when Angela and her friend Katherine disappear in the woods, only to return three days la...
Thanks to my American Cinema 1970’s class during last year, The Exorcist is the most recent film I’ve watched to become one of my favorites of all time: an objective yet immersive narrative with a direction that carefully builds on sick disturbing transgression and an unforgettable aura that broke the mold of everything that preceded it, and set the standard for the horror genre for decades to come.
So of course you’d get David Gordon Green to blunder it with “The Exorcist: Believer”. Talk about a full-blown assault on all your senses.
Almost everything here is lesser in contrast to the original: the film is somehow both formless and structureless in its presentation, taking the ‘And Then’ type of storytelling to heart in the worst manner possible with it desperately trying way too hard to match the perfection and suspense of that film without any creativity or actual suspense put into the final product. Artificial in texture and lacking in danger, there is no room for imagination or suspense across its inert mustiness and the deluge of poor, dry, uneven and unconvincing performances; Lidia Jewett and Olivia O’Neill are the ONLY saving graces of this cast and the entire film as a whole. Bless Leslie Odom Jr. and Ellen Burstyn for trying but it wasn’t enough.
The music and costumes are a generic ‘BAM-Non-factor’, dialogue is downright laughable and the makeup barely avoids becoming the same; wish I can say the same for the CGI because the results looked fairly inconsistent. Placement and staging of certain scenes hardly make sense from an editing standpoint, cinematography and lighting is fairly pedestrian, it is tonally inconsistent as it borders on unintentional hilarity so frequently and David Gordon Green’s direction fails to capture the persistent sense of the uncanny that William Friedkin’s original effortlessly crafted. Even when he does occasionally uses silence, misdirection, and negative space to give some ambience to a lacking scene, it’s immediately drowned out by everything else.
Even if I put to one side how SO DAMN HARD it tries to pull off the Halloween 2018 effect when other horror requels like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Children of The Corn and others failed miserably in trying to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle essence, everything about this story is either obnoxious, over-indulgent, extremely contrived, formulaic, or it has way too many cooks in the kitchen. Let’s begin with the fact that all three acts of this plot feel abruptly stitched together from what feels like three completely different films and doesn’t even remotely try to cover or write around it. Stumbling over one poorly implemented cliche after another is an unfortunate necessity we can’t avoid but thematically and narratively, the film is all over the damn place with plotholes and inconsistencies galore, earning none of the feelings that it attempts to evoke. No tension, no atmosphere, barely an aura, it just builds and builds…..to NOTHING.
It didn’t take long for me to catch on to how little faith the script has in its audience. The foundation is there as it wants to double down on the themes of the original film (having faith tested and renewed in the face of supernatural evil, anxieties about single parenting, and the threat, particularly to patriarchy, that surfaces when girls reach puberty) but the execution of those said themes are a giant misstep at best and tasteless at worse, packed to the brim with nothing characters the film has no idea what to do with, especially the returning Chris MacNeil, sluggish pacing that drags the movie out longer than it should, and delivers nothing any number of demonic possession movies haven't already done, getting cheap jumpscares around the corner every few minutes in its place.
It speaks to be as sanitized and safe as possible but only becomes infuriating when it reveals its scared of its own reflection and even more disgusted by its shadows. And honestly, doesn’t that just tell you everything you need to know? THE FILM ITSELF has NO IDEA what its story beats are meant to imply, what its characters are supposed to contribute to it or even how you’re supposed to watch it; it’s unable to appeal or relate to ANY collective group of audience. Because it’s so damn insecure of its own ideas, it persists on talking your damn ear off with an encyclopedia of the pointless history of boring-ville in the pause menu. I can understand it being difficult to Show, Don’t Tell in movie experiences like this; it’s something I’m struggling with as I’m writing a horror script myself but there’s almost no expressive exemplification in anything it does.
What the Devil were they thinking with this? Sure, there wasn’t even a point in trying to surpass the original in the first place but how can y’all be this tone deaf - trying to revive a “franchise” that didn’t even need to be franchised to begin with?! This film has no business calling itself an Exorcist film of any kind, let alone warranting the title of one of the most important films in the history of cinema.
