Review: The Exorcist: Believer

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Director David Gordon Green lurches from one iconic horror movie franchise - he directed the three recent "Halloween" reboot films - to another new trilogy, of which "The Exorcist: Believer" is the first entry. Despite a few atmospheric moments in the more involving first half of the picture, I'm not quite sure what possessed - sorry, couldn't help myself - the director to resurrect this saga.

William Friedkin's original 1973 film is one of the greatest of all horror movies and typically ranks high on most lists of the genre's best offerings. Its sequels - which include the interesting but muddled 1977 film "Heretic," the freaky but forgettable 1990 film "Legion" and some 21st century offerings that are not particularly memorable - aren't as bad as the "Texas Chainsaw" ones, but they're not very good either.

Green's film is set in small town Georgia, rather than Washington D.C., where the first film was located, and although we are never told if the demon possessing the two girls in this film is the same one as in the original, we get the sense that this might be a different spirit. The film opens in 2010 in Haiti where a photographer named Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his pregnant wife are vacationing. An earthquake occurs and Victor's wife is trapped beneath the rubble. Moments before, his wife had accepted a blessing for her baby from some locals. He is told that either the mother or the baby can be saved, but he must choose.

About 13 years later, Victor is living with his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), and has a portrait studio. One day, Angela asks her father permission to have an after-school study session with her best friend, Katherine (Olivia O'Neill); however, the girls instead go into the woods to commune with a spirit - we later get a flimsy reason for why this happened - and reemerge after being considered missing for several days. But something is off about the two girls.

These early scenes are the most effective and the creepiest as Green uses silence and atmosphere to create some pretty decent mood. This, of course, is all for naught as the film's second half is primarily a lot of recycled sturm und drang we've seen before in basically every exorcism movie. Not only does "Believer" not reach the gargantuan task of living up to the original, but it's really not much better than any number of other generic possession movies we've seen over the years.

The film is loaded with problems. For starters, as I'd mentioned, there's no good explanation as to how or why the girls were possessed - or even by whom or what, although this might be explored further along in this new trilogy. Secondly, the film's biggest set piece - during which the parents of the two girls, a former nun turned nurse (Ann Dowd), and some other clergy gather in a house to try to rid the two girls of the demon possessing them - lands with a thud, utilizing the same old tropes one might expect from such a scene (demons saying nasty things to cast doubt on those trying to exorcise them, characters all spouting religious texts out loud, some minor house rattling, etc.) and it all feels like an exercise.

The film's biggest flaw, however, is its criminal misuse of the great Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, whose daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), was possessed in the original film. She is brought on in a legacy character role, but there's little for her to do but drop some pearls of wisdom and come face to face briefly with the demon until reasons that I won't divulge essentially remove her from the action for most of the rest of the film. Not since Marilyn Burns was misused in the awful recent "Texas Chainsaw" film has an iconic character been underutilized in such a clunky way.

Green is a talented filmmaker and he has some abilities as a horror director. I liked the first entry in his "Halloween" saga before the final two chapters kind of got away from him. If "Believer" is the first in a new horror trilogy, it's not starting off on sure footing. Not that the world needed another "Exorcist" sequel - the first is good enough that it stands on its own - but this reboot feels like a missed opportunity.