The Exor­cist: Believ­er – a trashy, over­stuffed requel

“Some­times, to go for­ward,” root doc­tor Bee­hibe (Okwul Okpok­wasili) tells scep­ti­cal Vic­tor Field­ing (Leslie Odom Jr.) in The Exor­cist: Believ­er, ​“you have to go back.” This is also the guid­ing prin­ci­ple behind the film itself, which is both a 50^th-anniver­sary sequel to William Friedkin’s peer­less pos­ses­sion hor­ror The Exor­cist, and a puta­tive open­er to a new trin­i­ty of Blum­house pic­tures – in much the same way that direc­tor David Gor­don Green pre­vi­ous­ly res­ur­rect­ed, rev­o­lu­tionised and tril­o­gised John Carpenter’s Halloween. 

Green cer­tain­ly does go back, dis­in­ter­ring many of the original’s ​‘great­est hits’: fight­ing dogs in the pro­logue, a ​‘cunt­ing daugh­ter’ scarred and sup­pu­rat­ing, a blood­ied cru­ci­fix, pro­jec­tile spew, a revolv­ing head, and the odd lega­cy char­ac­ter or two, all to the famil­iar strains of Tubu­lar Bells. Yet he is also giv­ing these tropes a dif­fer­ent (head)spin, with a new sto­ry and char­ac­ters to con­front the old devil. 

In 2010, as pho­tog­ra­ph­er Vic­tor Field­ing hol­i­days with preg­nant Sorenne (Tracey Graves) in Port-au-Prince, an earth­quake expos­es an impos­si­ble dilem­ma: whether to save his wife or his unborn child. Now wid­owed and still haunt­ed by the prob­lem of evil that this inci­dent high­light­ed, Vic­tor has stopped believ­ing. Yet when his beloved teen daugh­ter Angela (Lidya Jew­ett) engages in a trans­gres­sive rit­u­al with her friend Kather­ine (Olivia Mar­cum), hop­ing to make con­tact with the moth­er she nev­er knew, the two girls instead bring back some­thing else which pos­sess­es the pair of them. 

As Vic­tor joins forces with Katherine’s god-fear­ing par­ents Tony (Nor­bert Leo Butz) and Miran­da (Jen­nifer Net­tles), his neigh­bours Ann (Ann Dowd) and Stu­art (Dan­ny McCarthy), and a col­lec­tion of priests, heal­ers – and Chris Mac­Neil (Ellen Burstyn) from the first film – he will, in try­ing to save these two girls, revis­it a famil­iar dilemma. 

Here the play­ers and pos­ses­sions are mul­ti­plied – legion, even. The dev­il now has two backs, and all these peo­ple with their dif­fer­ent crises of faith become like the Avengers assem­bling, so that the room in which the cli­mac­tic, lengthy exor­cism takes place seems as busy and over­crowd­ed as the nar­ra­tive is unfo­cused. William Peter Blat­ty, screen­writer of Friedkin’s film and author of the 1971 source nov­el, has stat­ed that his aim was to ter­ri­fy an increas­ing­ly sec­u­larised Amer­i­can audi­ence back into faith. The Exor­cist: Believ­er, though, does only what so many of the sequels, spin­offs, ripoffs and par­o­dies have done: close­ly crib the original’s more sen­sa­tion­al­ist tropes while miss­ing Friedkin’s sin­cer­i­ty and soul­ful­ness in grap­pling with gen­uine the­o­log­i­cal cruces.

A post­mod­ern, pick-and-mix approach to the world’s reli­gions serves to dilute this requel’s mes­sage fur­ther, as though belief – or the viewer’s hoped-for sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief – is an end in itself, with­out need for con­text or even God. Here the demon­ic seems to be just life’s bad shit, and the divine prov­i­dence that ex-nun Ann comes to recog­nise in the film’s con­flu­ence of events is reducible to script con­trivance. Far from con­vert­ing view­ers, this mere­ly cash­es in on their back­ward-look­ing nos­tal­gia, with­out mov­ing for­ward to any­thing bet­ter, or even half as good. 

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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