Sometimes, I walk out of a movie, and think: how?
In the case of The Exorcist: Believer, it’s not a question of how it got commissioned in the first place – in an era of horror reboots and sequels, it was only a matter of time before someone had a crack at updating William Friedkin’s iconic classic. No, the question is how David Gordon Green managed to make a movie this gobsmackingly incompetent.
Maybe I should have expected it, after his disastrous tenure with the Halloween franchise, but The Exorcist: Believer is almost jaw-droppingly bad. Not for the lack of effort from the cast, who really do try their best to elevate this trashfire, but Green and co-writers Danny McBride, Peter Sattler, and Scott Teems delivered a dysfunctional disaster of a horror movie that should see them politely invited to leave the genre alone for life.
I mean, where to even start with Believer? It’s bizarrely paced, with chunks clear hacked out at random intervals to leave room for more boring sequel-baiting; heaven forfend that we don’t see Ellen Burstyn showing a laminated picture of Regan to camera, but don’t bother to catch us up on why the church doesn’t want to send an exorcist to this clearly-critical case, right? Characters refer to key events that happen off-screen that were clearly meant to be in the movie, have flashbacks to events they weren’t there for, the timeline is wonky and poorly-articulated, threads are picked up and dropped seemingly without reason. It honestly feels like watching a movie that’s had twenty-five minutes cut out of it at complete random, there’s so much set up and referenced that doesn’t come close to paying off. A movie this long shouldn’t feel so insubstantial, but somehow, they managed to pull it off.
Perhaps the biggest sin for me is how whittled-down the majority of the characters have ended up in this final cut – the character work seems to be the biggest aspect to take a hit in these random cuts, and it shows. It’s a really huge cast for a movie this flimsy, and most of them are condemned to a grindingly blunt expository introduction before they spend the rest of their screentime looking worriedly in the direction of the afflicted girls. There are great actors in this movie (Ann Dowd, you deserved better than this, queen), but almost all of them are embarrassingly wasted with paper-thin arcs that culminate in them shouting Bible verses over the top of each other. There’s potential here in plenty of these characters, but this muddled, inconsequential writing renders them all down to an indistinct sludge.
And then, of course, there is the exorcism, unarguably the most important part of the movie in terms of spectacle. And it’s…boring? It’s an extension of the issues of the rest of the movie, with muddy character work and inconsistent plot direction rendering this an exercise in just trying to get this over with rather than delivering a big cinematic experience. There are the better part of a dozen characters here for this climactic moment, and half of them I don’t even confidently know the names of. The stakes of this exorcism rely on me being really invested in the characters involved, but the film’s build-up is so messy and weak as to render this downright boring.
I doubt The Exorcist: Believer was ever destined to be a great movie. Maybe it was never going to be a good movie. But the version of it we got here is such an insult of a film, a lazy, boring, poorly-constructed mess with an iconic franchise slapped over the top of it to get butts in seats. It’s almost impressive how little skill, effort, or even care was put into this movie behind the camera, and, with the threat of a trilogy hanging over our heads, all we can hope is that they give it to someone other than David Gordon Green and his horror-incompetent cohorts.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Dexerto)
No But Listen 