THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER (2023)

Studio:   Universal/Blumhouse
Director: David Gordon Green
Writer:   Peter Sattler, David Gordon Green, Scott Teems, Danny McBride
Producer: David Robinson, James G. Robinson, Jason Blum
Stars:    Leslie Odom Jr., Lidya Jewett, Olivia O'Neill, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Ann Dowd, Ellen Burstyn

Review Score:

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Summary:

A desperate father seeks help from unexpected sources in his community to save two young girls from demonic possession.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with her photographer husband Victor, Sorenne Fielding is led by a local boy to a spiritual reader who supposedly performs a blessing of protection over Sorenne's unborn baby Angela. A short time later, Sorenne is critically injured during an earthquake that devastates the area. Due to the severity of his wife's wounds, a doctor tells Victor he will have to choose between saving either Sorenne or Angela. Victor ends up becoming a single father.

13 years later in Percy, Georgia, Angela Fielding leaves Peges Middle School with her best friend Katherine. The two girls walk into nearby woods where they perform a makeshift seance intended to allow Angela to communicate with her dead mother.

That night, neither girl returns home, prompting a frantic search by Victor, the police, and Katherine's parents Tony and Miranda. Victor finds a shoe and a necklace in the woods where the two girls held their ritual. Detective Konik leads the police investigation as tensions tighten between the parents.

Victor comes home to find his neighbor Stuart, who is also Victor's training partner, having a woman named Dr. Beehibe bless Amanda's bedroom with African rituals. Stuart explains that he just wants to help by going outside traditional belief systems, but Victor kicks them both out of his house.

Three days after their disappearance, a farmer finds Angela and Katherine huddled in a barn 30 miles away from where they were last seen. Unaware of how long they were missing and with no memories of what happened, the girls are taken to a hospital for examination. Both of them are observed behaving bizarrely.

Despite her worsening condition, Victor brings Angela back home. Amidst her strange actions, Angela tells Victor how she was trying to contact Sorenne while in the woods with Katherine.

Victor rushes Angela back to the hospital after she begins experiencing violent convulsions. Victor sees the words "help me" carved into his daughter's stomach flesh.

At church with her family, Katherine enters a trance, defiles the sanctuary, and shocks parishioners by raving uncontrollably at the crucifix behind the altar while covered in blood. Katherine's mother Miranda later tells Victor she believes the girls did something in the woods that opened them to demonic possession. She then tells the story of Jesus's death and resurrection to suggest their daughters spent three days in Hell. Tony also wonders if the girls brought something evil back with them, but Victor dismisses these notions.

At the hospital, Angela refers to a nurse named Ann, who is also Victor's next-door neighbor, as "Sister Mary Xavier" and references an abortion in Ann's past. Angela then laughs maniacally while bleeding suddenly from her stomach scars.

Ann catches Victor outside his house to tell him about her interaction with Angela. Ann explains that she once planned to become a nun and also had an abortion, which Angela somehow knew even though Ann never told either fact to anyone. Ann gives Victor the book "A Mother's Explanation" by Chris MacNeil, whose daughter Regan underwent an infamous exorcism 50 years earlier, even though Victor doubts any beliefs related to religion.

After noting from Chris MacNeil's book that her possessed daughter also had the words "help me" carved into her flesh, Victor tracks down Chris with help from Stuart and Ann. Meanwhile, Ann consults Father Maddox for help from the church.

At her waterfront home, Chris and Victor discuss Regan's exorcism along with how Chris became consumed with understanding what happened. Chris reveals that Regan went into hiding and has been estranged from Chris ever since her book's success.

Through the similarities in their experiences, Victor convinces Chris to visit Angela in the hospital. Chris notes that the demon inside Angela recognizes her.

Victor and Chris next visit Tony and Miranda to find their house in disarray. Chris confronts Katherine in her bedroom. Amidst paranormal activity and under the demon's influence, Katherine uses a crucifix to stab out both of Chris's eyes.

Ann and Father Maddox consult Catholic Church officials to formally request an exorcism for both girls. Their request is ultimately denied and psychiatric treatment recommended instead.

Victor visits Chris in the hospital. Chris tells Victor that both of the afflicted families as well as their neighbors are now connected, and it is up to Victor to bring everyone together through their collective faith and hope.

Victor asks Stuart to reintroduce him to Dr. Beehibe so she can employ her African spiritual practices once again. With more help from Ann, Stuart, Katherine's parents, and Pastor Don Revans, Victor prepares a room in his house where both girls are restrained to chairs bolted to the floor for an exorcism.

Following Father Maddox's explanation that the church will not sanction him to perform the rite, Ann takes it upon herself to lead the exorcism. Once the exorcism begins, escalating paranormal activity besieges the room.

With the demon in control, Angela confronts Victor about the choice he was presented 13 years ago, revealing that Victor actually instructed the Haitian doctor to save his wife over his daughter. The demon claims God played a trick on Victor by having his daughter survive anyway, and taunts that Victor never really wanted Angela. The demon then says Victor will now have to decide who will survive between Angela and Katherine, or else both girls will die. Victor refuses to choose. Miranda also says she cannot choose between the two girls.

Reacting to an earlier interaction with Victor, Father Maddox enters to take over the exorcism from Ann. However, the demons supernaturally twist the priest's neck to kill him.

Victor drapes Angela in his wife's keepsake scarf to break through to his daughter. Tony interrupts by shouting that he chooses Katherine to survive over Angela. More paranormal activity erupts. Both girls break free from their restraints and levitate. Angela seemingly drops dead, but soon returns to life in her father's arms while Katherine unexpectedly dies instead.

Angela eventually returns to school. Tony and Miranda mourn the death of their daughter. Regan MacNeil surprises her mother by finally coming out of hiding to visit Chris in the hospital.

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Review:

"The Exorcist: Believer" belongs to a subset of sequels known as "legacy," which is the adjective added to movies that jettison narrative baggage often associated with being the umpteenth entry in a long-running property. The idea being these films get to ignore inconvenient continuity by essentially saying the only canonical movie is the original, and audiences should forget everything else in between. The downside though, and it seems some stewards never fully considered this, is that by taking other sequels out of the mix, they're resetting a series' standard of quality, not just its fiction.

Look at the work "The Exorcist: Believer" cuts out for itself as a legacy sequel. Fans could wave away a franchise film's faults by coming up with a comparison like, "at least 'Attack of the Clones' isn't as bad as 'The Phantom Menace.'" Yet by removing "Exorcist: The Beginning" and "Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist" from the conversation through imaginary erasure, "Believer" leaves itself alone next to what's commonly considered one of the greatest horror films of all time. And if only the original and this new sequel now exist, there's nowhere to go but down. Why raise the bar so high when "Exorcist II: The Heretic" allows you to step right over it?

Following the road map written by the first film, "The Exorcist: Believer" opens in a foreign locale. When his pregnant wife suffers a critical injury during a Haitian earthquake, Victor gets presented with a heartbreaking scenario. Only his wife or his unborn daughter can be saved, and Victor must choose who.

We don't see Victor wrestle with his decision. We don't even see him make it. Assumptions might be made, however, as the film quickly jumps ahead to 13 years later with Victor raising Angela as a single dad in Georgia. They're got the typical filmic father-daughter relationship. He reminds her of responsibilities while also lightly ribbing her. She's a doting daddy's girl, but also an independent teen who wants to split time with her friends. Yada yada yada, a phrase which can fill in for so much of the story's summary.

Anxious to communicate with the dead mother she never met, Angela enters a forest to perform a pseudo-seance with her classmate Katherine. The two girls exit, but not until three days later, when their sudden reappearance ends a desperate search, although bizarre behavior brings new concerns. Yada yada yada, Angela and Katherine both brought home evil. Now Victor's best hope for expelling it lies with Chris MacNeil, whose own daughter Regan underwent that infamous exorcism five full decades ago, and who coincidentally moved from Georgetown to Georgia so Victor doesn't have too far to drive to find her.

In addition to shoving in Ellen Burstyn for credibility, it would appear that the brightest idea the creatives could come up with for refreshing "The Exorcist" 50 years later is that instead of one demon possessing one girl, now two demons possess two girls. Or maybe it's one demon possessing both, I'm not sure. Either way, doubling the demonry should double the thrills, right? That was probably the theory anyway. In practice, doubling the demonry only doubles the tropes.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what would be fundamentally different about how the plot plays out if there were only one possessed girl instead of two. The closest "Believer" comes to justifying its duality arrives in an attempt to connect a callback to the "Sophie's Choice" prologue. Except the film fumbles that tenuous tie by yanking the difficult decision right out of the primary protagonist's hands, weirdly hot potato'ing the problem to a side character who speaks up in Victor's place during the climax.

What's weirder is producers miraculously managed to convince Ellen Burstyn to return to her Academy Award-nominated role of Chris MacNeil, something she seemingly had little interest in doing for half a century, and the best script they brought her was a carbon copy of every other rote exorcism movie that drops straight to streaming five or six times each year. From the skeptical parent and confused doctors to the Catholic bureaucracy and gravelly demon voice spitting out secrets it should not know, what is there in "Believer" that isn't in dozens of similarly standard spookers? When your most exciting sequence is a scene of digital smoke battling a rival swirl of digital smoke, it's high time to rethink modern scare tactics.

We can keep going with the wondering by asking, without Chris MacNeil's cursory presence and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" on the soundtrack, what gives this movie a distinct "The Exorcist" identity? It's called "The Exorcist" (capital T and E) after all, yet "the exorcist" (lowercase T and E) in this film barely registers as a blip on the character radar. Is this exorcist even the priest who only stands in the room long enough to have his neck snapped? Is it the nun-turned-nurse who starts off the ceremony? Is it the shaman-esque woman incorporating a different set of religious rituals? It's difficult to discern amidst a potpourri of Christian dogma, African herbalism, and miscellaneous belief systems that can only come from four different contributors credited for an otherwise straight-line story that could have been generated by machine-learning AI.

Amidst that amalgamation of mish-mashing pieces, it's equally difficult to home in on one thematic thread when so many superfluous strands get in the way. For every on-track idea about finding faith in collective community, there are three dead-end side strings. In separate instances, each girl's father becomes oddly aggressive, first verbally then physically, about transient men they suspect of involvement in their daughters' disappearances for no reason other than they are homeless. Victor also sees strange blurs on a portrait he photographed of a completely unrelated family, perhaps as a precursor for what's to come? Then there's the unexplained insinuation that a random woman cursed Victor's pregnant wife in Haiti. Ancillary elements really do run all over the place.

Since Victor isn't nearly as engaging as Chris, and neither Angela nor Katherine as endearing as Regan, "The Exorcist: Believer" has no chance of filling its namesake's shoes as anything more than an ordinary piece of possession pap. Heaven help the creatives who still have to deliver two additional sequels in this proposed new trilogy to make the studio's $400 million investment in "The Exorcist" rights remotely worthwhile. Maybe they should hope for help from Hell instead. How much worse off would they be?

Review Score: 50

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