Near the end of William Friedkin's 1973 groundbreaking masterpiece The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty's electrifying book of the same name, the titular exorcist, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), and his assistant, the quietly tragic Father Karras (Jason Miller), take a break during the excruciating exorcism they are performing on young Regan (Linda Blair). Their faces are taut and their gazes are haunted as they sit on the staircase outside the girl's bedroom. They share a tense moment of silence as every palpable second drops between them like a grain of sand in a nearly-empty hourglass.
"Why this girl?" Father Karras asks, the weight of the horrors just witnessed hitting him like a tonne of bricks. The priest, beleaguered throughout the film by doubts of faith, asks Father Merrin what could possibly be the purpose or reason for such torture of young Regan and everyone around her.
"I think the point is to make us despair," Father Merrin says with his head lowered. "To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To reject the possibility that God could love us." Father Merrin then excuses himself and goes to the bathroom to take his nitroglycerine pills in private.
Blatty lifted this scene — so still and sparse but weighty as primal fear — very faithfully from his book when writing the screenplay. It adroitly communicates the thesis of the film and the text: the life-preserving necessity of a dogged faith in anything at all (the self, others, love, God) in the face of frenetic ambiguity.
One of the many reasons why The Exorcist is such a landmark achievement in cinema and literature is because of Friedkin and Blatty's (along with von Sydow, Miller and Blair's) ability to convey so much — philosophy, fear, anguish, hope — through so little. Moments of bracketed humanity, like silence, tearful gazes and muffled cries, all contain as much heft as expository dialogue, which Blatty pruned for the film to stunning effect.
The Exorcist: Believer is considered by the filmmakers to be a direct sequel to the 1973 classic (and therefore necessitates comparison), and scans about as circumstantial as a used Band-Aid stuck to the floor of a public pool. Completely useless and an eyesore of a film, it is artistically, ideologically and morally bankrupt; the film deserves to be relegated to the trash.
Directed by David Gordon Green, the plot is — ostensibly and very loosely — about two 12-year-old girls, Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia O'Neill), who disappear in the woods after attempting some obscure and half-heartedly described ritual intended to allow Angela the ability to speak with her dead mother. The girls reappear three days later with burned and blistered feet and no recollection of what happened to them or how long they were gone for. When both Angela and Katherine begin exhibiting signs of demonic possession, Angela's father Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) reaches out to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn reprising her role from The Exorcist) for help.
Less entertaining than a McDonald's commercial and more cringe-inducing than a Christian DaySpring greeting card, the film inexplicably becomes a vehicle for pro-life rhetoric and Christian ideology, the latter of which is delivered without artistic nuance and is about as bald-faced as a poster on a hydro pole. There are plenty of sermons and monologues delivered by supporting characters, which are overlaid on top of saccharine montages backed by sickly instrumentals of liturgical dances or Holy Rollers at various denominations of Christian churches. So much of the film feels like it belongs on a daytime Christian talk show.
Shot through this visually confusing and ideologically regressive, nauseating mess is girlboss feminism. Ann Dowd plays Ann, a nurse who begins the film screaming; as Victor's neighbour, she's annoyed at him for forgetting his trashcans by the curb. By the film's end, though, she's become the hero, the titular exorcist, because feminism.
We learn that she initially wanted to become a nun, but apparently couldn't because she got pregnant and had an abortion. When the demon possessing Angela spews some gross words at Ann about how she "carved" her baby out, we see Ann riddled with guilt over her abortion. As she increasingly becomes the centre around which the film nonsensically whirls, we are treated with her many monologues, expounding the importance of faith and togetherness and not aborting babies, which she has the right to do because of her religious training, apparently.
The film's greatest injustice, though, is its misuse of Burstyn's Chris, who is brought on to help Victor make sense of what is happening to Angela. Burstyn tries her best with the crapshoot that is the script, whose greatest sacrilegious offence comes when Victor asks Chris about the particulars of exorcism. Chris says she didn't really witness Regan's exorcism, that she wasn't "allowed" into the room because she "wasn't a part of the patriarchy" — a statement so categorically false and not at all the mic drop the film thinks it is.
I wonder whether any of this film's creators even watched Friedkin's film; whether they realized that the first two acts of The Exorcist depict Chris doing everything in her power to help her beloved daughter, who increasingly becomes lost to a grotesque and horrific entity. For much of the film, Chris painstakingly cares for Regan, even as the demon Pazuzu hurls vitriol and violence her way.
In the book, Father Karras tells Chris to keep away from Regan as often as she can: "The more you're exposed to her present behaviour, the greater the chance of some permanent damage being done to your feelings about her. Stay clear." Chris tries to help Father Merrin and Father Karras during the exorcism many times and is frequently physically present in the room. But the demon assails her with wretched accusations and the horrifying contortions of her daughter's body. Chris repeatedly says she can't witness anymore, but knows she must so that Regan might be safe. Because of the confines of film, it is understandable, through no stretch of logic, that Blatty might have glossed over certain aspects of these scenes.
Nevertheless, in The Exorcist, Burstyn is still spellbinding as she runs to Regan with her face wrenched with pain, love and fear, even as Regan hits her and repeatedly pushes her away. Chris has spent so much time with Regan by the point of the exorcism that the moments she gets to herself when Father Merrin shows up seem a near grace allowed to her by Friedkin and Blatty — evidenced by the tired smile that hangs on her lips after she asks Father Merrin whether he wants some brandy in his coffee, and he accepts.
For Believer, all this seems much too complex to fathom. That the film has the gall to say that "patriarchy" kept Chris from witnessing the exorcism illustrates its deep misunderstanding not just of the source material, but also of what it means to be human, to love, to want to care for a child even as the child lashes out against you.
It's sadly appropriate for a film that knows it will make a lot of money for the simple fact that it can claim lineage to one of the greatest horror films ever made. It's not surprising that Green perfunctorily stamps flashy, trending words throughout the film's hollow, soulless script — the IP mined to hell and back. The film seems written with the dictum to "girlboss-ify exorcisms," something that last year's Prey for the Devil attempted with at least a modicum of ingenuity, honesty and originality. Believer, in contrast, is truly decrepit.
Green's film doesn't even have the guts to have fun with the iconography the original film made famous and that various other exorcism and spoof horror films are ideologically indebted to. Even the score — the opening to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, which The Exorcist used as its iconic theme — is so muted and hushed that it begs asking: why even license the theme if they're not going to use it to its full effect?
The first few naturalistic moments of the film — moments between Victor and Angela, which are actually tender and endearing — are rushed through unceremoniously, like items being checked off a to-do list to warrant an exorcism scene that, when it does arrive, is unsatisfying, bloodless CGI.
The film's end is a veritable slog of uninspired noise and flurry — the girls screaming as Ann, with all the affected gusto of a professor lecturing to a sleepy cohort during an 8 a.m. class, says a few bits of scripture, girded by a straining, inchoate, melodramatic, stringy score — that makes one wish the film would hurry up and end already.
In every one of my rewatches of The Exorcist, when von Sydow's Father Merrin says that the point of possession is "to make us despair," the line hits me like divine revelation. It's such a profoundly obvious thing to say, but it explains Regan's situation with such poetic heft and grace that it's impossible not to gasp at Father Merrin's words, for we have indeed despaired watching sweet Regan transform into a hellish monster. So deeply enveloped by the film and entrenched in its all-encompassing drama, we wonder alongside Father Karras how a good and benevolent God could allow for such suffering.
The Exorcist takes its time as it sets over us like a fog, allowing us in as it walks with us through science and lands nervously but hopefully at religion with genuine love, care and respect for Regan. The beauty of the first film is that, despite Blatty's devout Catholic faith, there is still a great, delicious sense of ambiguity by the film's end — the case could still be made, by a committed enough viewer (read: me), that all that happens to Regan could still potentially be explained by science. The film, like any good work of art, raises many questions, sparks rebuttal, fruitful conversations, creative thought. Believer, meanwhile, splatters like Christian propaganda with nothing profound to say or challenge us with.
The Exorcist: Believer is a film almost like an unholy possession: it takes hold of a good, rich, dynamic and complex work of art and saps it of all its lively vigour, of all that made it good and worthwhile and human. The only reason it gets a rating above zero is that its existence allowed Burstyn to set up a scholarship program for young actors. (Editor's note: our CMS doesn't actually have a field for a zero rating anyway.)
Believer takes Friedkin and Blatty's genius ideas, and injects something vile into them, eating their soul.
(Universal Pictures)"Why this girl?" Father Karras asks, the weight of the horrors just witnessed hitting him like a tonne of bricks. The priest, beleaguered throughout the film by doubts of faith, asks Father Merrin what could possibly be the purpose or reason for such torture of young Regan and everyone around her.
"I think the point is to make us despair," Father Merrin says with his head lowered. "To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To reject the possibility that God could love us." Father Merrin then excuses himself and goes to the bathroom to take his nitroglycerine pills in private.
Blatty lifted this scene — so still and sparse but weighty as primal fear — very faithfully from his book when writing the screenplay. It adroitly communicates the thesis of the film and the text: the life-preserving necessity of a dogged faith in anything at all (the self, others, love, God) in the face of frenetic ambiguity.
One of the many reasons why The Exorcist is such a landmark achievement in cinema and literature is because of Friedkin and Blatty's (along with von Sydow, Miller and Blair's) ability to convey so much — philosophy, fear, anguish, hope — through so little. Moments of bracketed humanity, like silence, tearful gazes and muffled cries, all contain as much heft as expository dialogue, which Blatty pruned for the film to stunning effect.
The Exorcist: Believer is considered by the filmmakers to be a direct sequel to the 1973 classic (and therefore necessitates comparison), and scans about as circumstantial as a used Band-Aid stuck to the floor of a public pool. Completely useless and an eyesore of a film, it is artistically, ideologically and morally bankrupt; the film deserves to be relegated to the trash.
Directed by David Gordon Green, the plot is — ostensibly and very loosely — about two 12-year-old girls, Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia O'Neill), who disappear in the woods after attempting some obscure and half-heartedly described ritual intended to allow Angela the ability to speak with her dead mother. The girls reappear three days later with burned and blistered feet and no recollection of what happened to them or how long they were gone for. When both Angela and Katherine begin exhibiting signs of demonic possession, Angela's father Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) reaches out to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn reprising her role from The Exorcist) for help.
Less entertaining than a McDonald's commercial and more cringe-inducing than a Christian DaySpring greeting card, the film inexplicably becomes a vehicle for pro-life rhetoric and Christian ideology, the latter of which is delivered without artistic nuance and is about as bald-faced as a poster on a hydro pole. There are plenty of sermons and monologues delivered by supporting characters, which are overlaid on top of saccharine montages backed by sickly instrumentals of liturgical dances or Holy Rollers at various denominations of Christian churches. So much of the film feels like it belongs on a daytime Christian talk show.
Shot through this visually confusing and ideologically regressive, nauseating mess is girlboss feminism. Ann Dowd plays Ann, a nurse who begins the film screaming; as Victor's neighbour, she's annoyed at him for forgetting his trashcans by the curb. By the film's end, though, she's become the hero, the titular exorcist, because feminism.
We learn that she initially wanted to become a nun, but apparently couldn't because she got pregnant and had an abortion. When the demon possessing Angela spews some gross words at Ann about how she "carved" her baby out, we see Ann riddled with guilt over her abortion. As she increasingly becomes the centre around which the film nonsensically whirls, we are treated with her many monologues, expounding the importance of faith and togetherness and not aborting babies, which she has the right to do because of her religious training, apparently.
The film's greatest injustice, though, is its misuse of Burstyn's Chris, who is brought on to help Victor make sense of what is happening to Angela. Burstyn tries her best with the crapshoot that is the script, whose greatest sacrilegious offence comes when Victor asks Chris about the particulars of exorcism. Chris says she didn't really witness Regan's exorcism, that she wasn't "allowed" into the room because she "wasn't a part of the patriarchy" — a statement so categorically false and not at all the mic drop the film thinks it is.
I wonder whether any of this film's creators even watched Friedkin's film; whether they realized that the first two acts of The Exorcist depict Chris doing everything in her power to help her beloved daughter, who increasingly becomes lost to a grotesque and horrific entity. For much of the film, Chris painstakingly cares for Regan, even as the demon Pazuzu hurls vitriol and violence her way.
In the book, Father Karras tells Chris to keep away from Regan as often as she can: "The more you're exposed to her present behaviour, the greater the chance of some permanent damage being done to your feelings about her. Stay clear." Chris tries to help Father Merrin and Father Karras during the exorcism many times and is frequently physically present in the room. But the demon assails her with wretched accusations and the horrifying contortions of her daughter's body. Chris repeatedly says she can't witness anymore, but knows she must so that Regan might be safe. Because of the confines of film, it is understandable, through no stretch of logic, that Blatty might have glossed over certain aspects of these scenes.
Nevertheless, in The Exorcist, Burstyn is still spellbinding as she runs to Regan with her face wrenched with pain, love and fear, even as Regan hits her and repeatedly pushes her away. Chris has spent so much time with Regan by the point of the exorcism that the moments she gets to herself when Father Merrin shows up seem a near grace allowed to her by Friedkin and Blatty — evidenced by the tired smile that hangs on her lips after she asks Father Merrin whether he wants some brandy in his coffee, and he accepts.
For Believer, all this seems much too complex to fathom. That the film has the gall to say that "patriarchy" kept Chris from witnessing the exorcism illustrates its deep misunderstanding not just of the source material, but also of what it means to be human, to love, to want to care for a child even as the child lashes out against you.
It's sadly appropriate for a film that knows it will make a lot of money for the simple fact that it can claim lineage to one of the greatest horror films ever made. It's not surprising that Green perfunctorily stamps flashy, trending words throughout the film's hollow, soulless script — the IP mined to hell and back. The film seems written with the dictum to "girlboss-ify exorcisms," something that last year's Prey for the Devil attempted with at least a modicum of ingenuity, honesty and originality. Believer, in contrast, is truly decrepit.
Green's film doesn't even have the guts to have fun with the iconography the original film made famous and that various other exorcism and spoof horror films are ideologically indebted to. Even the score — the opening to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, which The Exorcist used as its iconic theme — is so muted and hushed that it begs asking: why even license the theme if they're not going to use it to its full effect?
The first few naturalistic moments of the film — moments between Victor and Angela, which are actually tender and endearing — are rushed through unceremoniously, like items being checked off a to-do list to warrant an exorcism scene that, when it does arrive, is unsatisfying, bloodless CGI.
The film's end is a veritable slog of uninspired noise and flurry — the girls screaming as Ann, with all the affected gusto of a professor lecturing to a sleepy cohort during an 8 a.m. class, says a few bits of scripture, girded by a straining, inchoate, melodramatic, stringy score — that makes one wish the film would hurry up and end already.
In every one of my rewatches of The Exorcist, when von Sydow's Father Merrin says that the point of possession is "to make us despair," the line hits me like divine revelation. It's such a profoundly obvious thing to say, but it explains Regan's situation with such poetic heft and grace that it's impossible not to gasp at Father Merrin's words, for we have indeed despaired watching sweet Regan transform into a hellish monster. So deeply enveloped by the film and entrenched in its all-encompassing drama, we wonder alongside Father Karras how a good and benevolent God could allow for such suffering.
The Exorcist takes its time as it sets over us like a fog, allowing us in as it walks with us through science and lands nervously but hopefully at religion with genuine love, care and respect for Regan. The beauty of the first film is that, despite Blatty's devout Catholic faith, there is still a great, delicious sense of ambiguity by the film's end — the case could still be made, by a committed enough viewer (read: me), that all that happens to Regan could still potentially be explained by science. The film, like any good work of art, raises many questions, sparks rebuttal, fruitful conversations, creative thought. Believer, meanwhile, splatters like Christian propaganda with nothing profound to say or challenge us with.
The Exorcist: Believer is a film almost like an unholy possession: it takes hold of a good, rich, dynamic and complex work of art and saps it of all its lively vigour, of all that made it good and worthwhile and human. The only reason it gets a rating above zero is that its existence allowed Burstyn to set up a scholarship program for young actors. (Editor's note: our CMS doesn't actually have a field for a zero rating anyway.)
Believer takes Friedkin and Blatty's genius ideas, and injects something vile into them, eating their soul.