David Gordon Green’s career is one almost wholly compromised of boom-bust cycles. His first period was his most consistent, with him taking those UNCSA-built indie roots and using them to make rough-edged dramas about life in small-town America – most often in the South, not limited to it. After Snow Angels had its release botched, Green turned to arms of the Apatow-adjacent clique in Hollywood, starting off strong with Pineapple Express before beginning a slow and steady decline (at least in his films that were aimed at the masses, his prestige indie work like Prince Avalanche and Joe as well as studio fare like Stronger remained exceptionally competent) with Your Highness and The Sitter being back-to-back career lowlights. Then Blumhouse came a-callin’, aware that he’d pitched Suspiria when people began kicking around remaking that, and handed him the keys to the Halloween franchise for legacyquels galore. You know the story: The first one’s very good, the second’s alright, and the third is indistinguishable from the kind of bullshit that Green was brought in to clean up. In keeping with both traditions, The Exorcist: Believer does away with everything canon but the William Friedkin-directed original and attempts to re-capture the terror that folks had upon walking out of the theater in ’74, and it’s also a canary in the coal mine; one practically shrieking “Switch it up! Pivot!” as it chokes to death on toxic fumes. The horror ore has been stripped, and all that remains is poison.
Alternatively titled 2 Exorcist 2 Regans, Green seems to think that the ante-raising solution to make a sequel to the ’74 film was in front of everyone’s faces in the first place. It isn’t to make it even weirder and esoteric like John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic or to hop subgenres like series author-turned-director William Peter Blatty did by making Exorcist III into a spiritual thriller (and Green should probably be thankful that he didn’t do something interesting, given that he’d probably have been replaced by Renny Harlin, if Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist is any proof). No, this problem is answered by asking another question: What if two girls were possessed by whatever entity decided to fuck with the lives of a bunch of suburbanites outside of Atlanta? I’d say “demon,” but the coyness is in keeping with the movie’s perspective on the franchise’s primary faith. Catholicism isn’t a big factor aside from being the religion with the most name-brand recognition of its exorcism rites, and if you wanted to see a non-denominational squad of would-be Spiritual Avengers team up to try and stop the devil, congratulations, you have won at the expense of every other person who buys a ticket to see this film.
What’s genuinely weird about Green’s approach here is that the narrative provides him with plenty of outs to do something innovative. The film begins in Haiti, where Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) is vacationing with his very pregnant wife on the exact same day in 2010 that the Earthquake struck (and it is pretty terrible that the visual media legacy of that awful humanitarian crisis in the U.S. may amount to just this and “We Are The World 25 For Haiti”). She is mortally wounded trying to escape their hotel, but their child survives thanks to the quick intervention of aid workers. Thirteen years later, Angela (Lidya Jewett) is in middle school and has a loving and close relationship with her dad, though the subject of her mother’s passing is still a touchy one for Victor. One fateful day, she decides to go out into the woods with Katherine (Olivia Fielding), a classmate, after school and experiment with trying to “contact the dead” in the harmless way that kids normally do with Quija boards or, less so, adults do with the help of John Edward. When both girls don’t show up for dinner, well, shit hits the fan, inspiring a cross-county search for them that ends three days later when they’re found, terrified and cold, in a stable.
That’s when the freaky shit starts to happen. Katherine starts misbehaving in church, dumping communion grape juice (they’re Baptists) on her white dress, and Angela tries to choke out Victor with a scarf her mother wore. Were it not for the wounds on their thighs, burns on their feet, or rotting skin, this could pretty easily be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress: they have no real idea what happened while they were gone, and there are no easy answers. The community tries to help: Victor’s sparring partner brings over voodoo practitioners, and local pastors reach out, but it’s of no use. After all, he’s a rationalist who walked away from God years ago and has no intentions of looking back, lest his daughter become a pillar of salt. But this entity makes a big mistake when he taunts a nurse (Ann Dowd), Victor’s neighbor and a former nun-in-training, with very personal knowledge of her life. See, when they tell you that your HIPPA records are private, they don’t tell you that some D-tier demon (or daemon, per the NSA) has access to them, and it calls her by the name she would have taken if she’d taken her oath and also reminds her of the choices that led her to leave the faith before her vows. That’s when she tells Victor about this lady named Chris MacNeill (Ellen Burstyn) and her similar experiences with the supernatural.
See, up until Burstyn is introduced, The Exorcist: Believer oscillates between boring the audience to tears and making them laugh with genuine unintentional camp. Green slavishly imitates Friedkin’s keen sense of pacing and style without any of the development or punch that goes along with them: it is functionally the same in feel as any other Blumhouse film in recent months, with shitty digital cinematography and a garbled sound mix that mistakes quiet and crosstalk for ambiance. Moreover, the whole franchise is a horrible fit for Green, given that his cross-genre skills as a filmmaker are ill-suited to this material. His success in the Halloween revival came from his ability to craft viciously ironic and gory kills, but The Exorcist isn’t known for that. As a dramatist, his understated approach is best, which goes against the maximalist nature of the emotions on display, and his comedic stylings are a garbage fit here, especially when lacking a co-writer like Danny McBride to make the punchlines land. But Burstyn’s appearance opens the door to a plethora of possibilities, none of which he can capitalize on.
Since The Heretic is off the table, Chris MacNeill could have done anything with her life after “Tubular Bells” stopped playing, but instead, she became Dr. Loomis from Zombie’s Halloween II. She wrote a book about exorcisms in various cultures and used her daughter’s experience as a way to foreground it on some semi-factual basis, which totally alienated Regan and forced her into hiding. In one of Green’s Halloween movies, this would have made her either the first or second kill, but here it’s just a venue for her to be traumatized without having her do very much to impact the plot. For an actor of Burstyn’s talent and esteem, it’s bizarre that all Green can do is give her Chicken Soup for the Possessed Soul platitudes and make her a victim of some of the devil’s trickery, though, understandably. But MacNeill’s ideas are compelling as narrative fodder: are demons universally the same (a Beezelbub by any other name would still smell like sulfur), or are they oriented around a specific faith? Would a Zoroastrian be able to exorcize a Catholic demon? Would you have to go fully interfaith in order to free your kid from the trappings of possession?
Green sidesteps all of those questions and settles for ambiguity, which is less his fault and more the difficulty of making an Exorcist movie in the current moment. If there’s one thing that we’re lacking in modern society, it is faith – not in religion, but in all public spheres – and the climates are very different: the pool of lapsed Catholics to be frightened into some of that old-time religion by a particularly scary movie is much shallower than in 1974. It makes a certain amount of sense, at least to Western eyes, that there is no Father Merrin to show up in front of the light post, which is why finding a culture in which that figure is still extant – plenty of the world is still religious, after all – or exploring the conflict of an atheist in which Catholic Hell exists, might have been equally interesting approaches to crafting a continuation.
But Green’s solution is exactly the inverse of his approach to Haddonfield in the Halloween sequels: Community, which means we wind up with a six-person exorcism squad of gravitas-lacking faith leader stereotypes, in which the arrival of a latecomer is heralded like the Riders of Rohan swarming Helm’s Deep. It doesn’t help that the two-sided sword of progress stabs him at every chance: Green’s transgressions have no edge because, quite frankly, he can’t do the same shit that Friedkin could in ’74. There were people to provoke back then, who would have probably taken up pickets out in front of local moviehouses. Nor are there any conflicts between the different denominations: one has to think that there would be skepticism from even the most desperate believer in Georgia at bringing Catholic teachings into a protestant home.
If Green had chosen to explore these problems instead of treating them as obstacles to his tribute-making, Believer might have been able to approach some level of engagement with the audience, scaring the pants off of the faithful and at least hitting the skeptics in the proverbial “God-shaped hole” with the terror of a heavenly body politic legislating our actions from above in a society that has, for the most part, expanded and modified those rules in the intervening centuries since their inception. But even then, it would have stumbled upon one major issue: to soft-remake The Exorcist is a fool’s errand, given that the film is still able to provoke and scare the hell out of people. It is still relevant after all of these years and rightfully deserves its place in the horror canon, specifically because it can chill Catholics, Buddhists, and Agnostics alike with doubt about rationality.
The horror of religion isn’t in its ambiguity – that, for the most part, is the peace one finds in it, the idea that there’s a great beyond that we’ll only see at the conclusion of our stories and that we will never know the right one beyond our own faith in it – it’s in what happens when it is no longer obscured and instead becomes truth, whether we like it or not, like a Christian being sent to Hell because they didn’t die a warrior’s death to get a coveted spot in Valhalla. There are no Round Robins for Pascal’s Wager, after all. By diluting that, Green misses the point, and even if there were a decent movie surrounding the vacancy at its core, The Exorcist: Believer would have been a hollow echo. Instead, it’s just a $400 million bust, with two soon-to-be-cancelled streaming sequels on the way. God help us all.