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Two young girls bring something nasty home from the woods in this too-busy, uninvolving possession movie.
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‘The Exorcist: Believer’ | Anatomy of a Scene
David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Leslie Odom Jr. and Lidya Jewett.
“Hi, I’m David Gordon Green, the director and co-writer of ‘The Exorcist: Believer.’” [FAUCET KNOB SQUEAK] “So this sequence takes place shortly after the disappearance of Angela Fielding, the daughter of Victor Fielding, played by Leslie Odom Jr. And Angela has been missing for three days and just returned and starts to behave a little bit strangely.” “What you doing up, ladybug? Gotta use the bathroom.” “So with this sequence, I’m starting to establish the unnerving quality of a father that can’t quite explain the behavior of his daughter. One of the lessons I learned on the ‘Halloween’ movies is the effect of a continuous timeline. And so although the sequence is comprised of numerous shots, the effect is one long shot. And that slow burn, that time where there’s no gimmicks that you can process as a viewer, it adds a strange expectation of when something is gonna happen, slow moves, no expression from Angela. It’s almost the neutrality of her face that makes it so unusual because she is so full of charms, and smiles, and loving life. Here we’re starting to see things in a little bit of a subtler grade of expression.” [FAUCET KNOB SQUEAK] “What’d you say?” “Atmosphere is — sound design is subtle music that’s woven into the sound design. You’re a little bit on guard, you’re a little bit on edge as you’re letting that continuity unfold. And then that way, when she’s transcended this geography in a way that we know because we’ve established characters coming and going and walking in and out, it’s all the more unnatural and off putting.”
By Jeannette Catsoulis
- The Exorcist: Believer
- Directed by David Gordon Green
- Horror
- R
- 1h 51m
A half century ago, the great William Friedkin directed “The Exorcist,” blowing box-office records and audiences’ minds. Now David Gordon Green, not content with mining the “Halloween” franchise for a trilogy of uneven follow-ups, has returned to visit the same fate on one of the highest-grossing films of the 1970s. Kicking off with “The Exorcist: Believer,” this latest recycling project will continue with “The Exorcist: Deceiver,” planned for 2025. No word yet on the third.
If your main gripe with the original was its preoccupation with a single victim and the dogma of just one religious denomination, then this overpopulated sequel has you covered. Clearly believing that more is more, Green and Peter Sattler’s screenplay (which ignores the intervening franchise entries) gives us double the possessed, more than triple the faiths and a passel of enthusiastic exorcists. Keep them straight if you can.
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The setup is swiftly efficient. Thirteen years after losing his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), are settled in Georgia. Aside from tolerating a grumpy neighbor (Ann Dowd) and her complaints about Victor’s trash can management, the two seem happy enough. Then Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) head into the woods for some spiritual hanky-panky, returning three days later with blank memories and disturbing behaviors. Bring on the holy water!
Measured against the often mediocre standards of today’s glut of reboots and reimaginings, “Believer” is slickly professional, its young performers more than up to the task. It’s also disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, cautious, gesturing only wanly toward the original’s potent weave of puberty, religion and corporeal abuse. While no one is asking for lazy reruns of the infamous masturbation scene or that corkscrewing noggin (though both are hinted at here), there are plenty of ways for a filmmaker to till such fertile thematic soil. Instead, Green contents himself with inconsequential tinkering, like switching the gender of the first film’s evil entity. Shame on you if you assumed all demons were male.
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