I Just Saw

What is it with David Gordon Green and vintage horror reboots? His first Halloween reboot (2018) was fine, probably the best of the Halloween sequels, but the others were trash and now we have this. Why has he gone from such worthy indie dramas as George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003) to cheap commercial junk, repackaging genuine visions with Danny McBride (his producer and story guy on all these reboots)?

So, okay. Full disclosure. The Exorcist (1973) is my favourite film. Of all time. This will hopefully explain a lot of the intensity of what I’m about to say regarding The Exorcist: Believer, which I would have walked out of (joining several others) if I hadn’t been tasked with reviewing it.

The story is that Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr) is in Haiti when his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) is caught in an earthquake and dies, shortly after her baby bump is blessed by some sort of witch doctor or priestess. The child survives, and 13 years later in the US state of Georgia this daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), goes missing with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum), having decided to perform a pagan ritual in a rancid hole in the woods to contact Angela’s mother. (Honestly, these girls need Instagram.)

They show up three days later, having for some reason not died of exposure, with little memory of what happened and new, demonic personalities manifesting. The community brain trust kicks into gear. They include Ann (Ann Dowd), a nurse and one-time novitiate who puts Victor in touch with… sigh, Ellen Burstyn, returning at 90 years old to reprise her role in the original film as Chris McNeil, mother of the once possessed Regan (Linda Blair).

There’s so much wrong with this film that it’s hard to know where to start. It’s not scary, relying on jump scares, uninspired special effects, and shallow vulgarity that honestly caused me to burst out laughing on more than one occasion. Like Katherine masturbating in church while her horrified siblings look on, and Angela experiencing violent menstruation while taunting a woman about her abortion. There’s an undertone of misogyny to some of this material that was probably unintended, but still there.

This is the type of film where characters are so badly thought up and motivated that they feel like they’re from a sitcom. Riddle me this: if your neighbour’s daughter went missing, would you gather a group of witch doctors to chant, dance, and smoke up her bedroom, without her father knowing?

So far, a lot of this is just funny bad, but at a certain point, it becomes an act of offensive cultural vandalism. In one scene, Chris McNeil says that she would have witnessed Regan’s exorcism if it wasn’t for “the patriarchy”.

Here’s the thing: I consider myself a feminist. I believe patriarchy is a real thing and needs to be dismantled. But Chris McNeil in The Exorcist was not kept out of her daughter’s bedroom by the patriarchy.

Let me explain very delicately to Galaxy Brain Green why this idea is a total turd: in the original film, you see, Chris McNeil was a famous actor. She was not an exorcist. She had no interest in or knowledge of exorcism until it became her last resort. She was a charming, funny, intelligent single mother who lived an independent life. To have her say that she was kept out of the exorcism by the patriarchy in this film is to make her a narcissistic slack-wit.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Green compounds this characterisation by having her wander unprotected into a possessed girl’s bedroom and be immediately, gorily attacked. Why does he hate her original character so much? Why has he turned a strong female character into a complete ass?

This also ties in with how he depicts her as having gone on a speaking tour after Regan’s exorcism, releasing a book about it. Green, Green… what movie did you see when you decided to accept Blumhouse’s commission to adapt it? Did you fall asleep before the ending, when Chris packs up her Georgetown home and leaves in a car with Regan, intent on moving forward with their lives? When the church as embodied by Father Dyer echoes this sentiment by walking off with Lt Kinderman? Are your parents brother and sister?

And to studios: can we please stop giving Exorcist films to people who hate The Exorcist? We tried that once with John Boorman when he made Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and it was one of the worst films ever released; now here’s another.

Green tries to paper over the gaping cracks of his story with long, schmaltzy monologues about coming together as a community. One of these concludes the film when it should have ended with the shot of Odom Jr.’s eyes. This is a theming technique that Green has carried over from his Halloween trilogy but it’s never seemed more desperate than it does here.

This small-town vision clashes hard with whatever suspense he’s trying to generate with The Exorcist: Believer. That the film pushes the idea of hardline Christianity and ritualised hocus pocus as a socially bonding, benign force in the US is problematic. This is a country that’s seen a new resurgence in antiscientific beliefs post-COVID. Yet here comes The Exorcist: Believer to tell Americans that no, superstition is justified and the real quackery is psychiatry.

This is yet another misunderstanding of the original text by Galaxy Brain Green and McBride. The possession of Regan McNeil is treated by The Exorcist as a vanishingly rare event in our modern world, not an opportunity to scoff at human knowledge and progress, to pretend that your little community of superstitious cretins should be exorcising sick kids.

Blatty and Friedkin took care to ground their work in both scripture and medical knowledge. The Exorcist communicates that you should exhaust all medical and psychiatric avenues first, and even has the doctors be the ones to suggest exorcism because by appealing to the child’s “delusions” a sort of placebo effect might occur. This causes Chris to utter, with subtle incredulity and fear, one of the most important and affecting lines in the film: “You’re telling me that I should take my daughter to a witch doctor.” In Green’s hands, she would have gone straight to the witch doctor.

The Exorcist: Believer is stupid, moronic, simpering, smug, pathetic, offensive, contemptuous, and finally contemptible. Utterly. That Green and McBride are planning a trilogy of this is akin to “updating” The Wizard of Oz (1939) with dog mess and money shots. That 90-year-old Ellen Burstyn agreed to appear in it for more than a cameo, only to have her once strong and intelligent character turned into a vapid sideshow, is tragic. That Linda Blair played any role at all is… well, she’s a prominent activist in the animal rights movement and has helped to rehabilitate rescues, so I hope that she got to save some dogs with her cheque. If The Exorcist: Believer manages to fund some decent care for dispossessed animals… it’ll still be the worst film of 2023 that I’ve seen so far, but at least it will have done some good. Otherwise, though, I renounce it, and I hope it burns in hell. I give it 0.5 only to acknowledge that it’s at least in focus and of a basic technical standard.

Rating: 0.5/4