Now I'm a Believer
The Exorcist: Believer isn't too vulgar a display of power
For years now, it’s been a running joke that one David Gordon Green movie is so different from another that it’s impossible to nail down, in any meaningful way, what actually defines a David Gordon Green movie. Beginning with thoughtful independents like George Washington and All the Real Girls in the early aughts before veering rather unexpectedly into stoner-comedy territory with Pineapple Express and Your Highness, he then spent a full decade bouncing back and forth between sporadic returns to form (Prince Avalanche, Joe) and would-be awards contenders starring A-listers (Sandra Bullock in Our Brand Is Crisis, Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger). As if in response to this perceived identity crisis, Green appears to have settled, again quite unexpectedly, on a rather specific niche: horror trilogies that serve as continuations of once-beloved franchises whose best years are decades behind them.
It’s no surprise, then, that both his trio of Halloween movies as well as The Exorcist: Believer and its two planned sequels only acknowledge the first film in each respective series. Horror continuity is notoriously silly, with the chart showing Halloween’s overlapping timelines standing as perhaps the greatest visual aid Wikipedia has ever produced, and so it’s understandable that Green and his co-writers would prefer not to get lost in those particular weeds. On a meta level, it also communicates to diehard fans of these movies — both of which are regularly and rightfully cited as being among the greatest horror films of all time — that Green wants to do right by their legacies and memory-hole their unworthy sequels.
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He’s off to a good start. This time the prologue takes place not in Iraq but Haiti, where the catastrophic 2010 earthquake forces Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) to choose between saving his extremely pregnant wife and his unborn daughter; a time jump to the present reveals the outcome, with Victor now a single father raising his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) in suburban Georgia. She and her bestie Katherine (Olivia Marcum) wander into the woods later that day to invoke an ill-advised ritual they believe will allow her to communicate with her mother. It goes wrong — how could it not — and after vanishing without a trace they return three days later thinking they’ve only been gone a few hours.
“Wherever those girls went,” Katherine’s deeply religious father says, “they brought something back with them.” For once, the first-act alarmist is right: the two have returned as a kind of demonic dyad exhibiting the same tell-tale signs of possession Regan (Linda Blair) did half a century ago. But where the original treated exorcism as a last resort as likely to kill Regan as save her, in Believer it’s an inevitability demanded by the continued existence of valuable intellectual property. If that seems like a minor distinction, it’s not — it’s the same as Freddy and Jason always returning to Elm Street or Camp Crystal Lake despite appearing especially dead at the end of the prior film.
William Friedkin, legend that he was, would probably agree. He had nothing to do with any of the prior sequels to his masterwork, and made his feelings about this one known on Twitter some time ago: “There’s a rumor on IMDB that I’m involved with a new version of The Exorcist. This isn’t a rumor, it’s a flat-out lie. There’s not enough money or motivation in the world to get me to do this.” More power to him, but Green is a true devotee who clearly reveres his source material as a cinematic bible.
He honors it not by merely repeating it but by expanding upon it: Believer’s dual-possession twist proves to be its greatest idea, resulting in a conundrum that’s part prisoner’s dilemma and part Sophie’s Choice. It also plays into the title of the next installment, Deceiver, and helps bring about the long-awaited return of Ellen Burstyn to the series as a sort of exorcist emerita. Filled with longing and regret, she finds herself drawn back into the fray in much the same way that Ellen Ripley does in the later Alien movies: contending with an evil force she can outlive but not outrun, one that has defined her very existence from the first moment she was unlucky enough to come into contact with it.
The possessed teens, meanwhile, are disturbing in their own right even without spider-walking down the stairs; faces scarred, voices chthonic, they’re worthy heirs to Regan and unwitting vessels for the same demon that once possessed her. Their ordeal won’t make anyone pass out from fear, as the original did, but neither will it inspire anyone to projectile vomit in disgust.
Though fans of Green’s early work will be forgiven for wishing he’d direct his exceptional talent toward something more artful, his involvement in Halloween and now The Exorcist might best be understood as a kind of damage control. Resurrecting these franchises may be another vulgar display of power from an industry that’s been relying on existing ideas for far too long, but at least they’ve appointed a dedicated caretaker. Could he be doing something more meaningful than horror sequels no one asked for? Probably. Could anyone else make a better version of those horror sequels than he has? Probably not.
Huh!
Huh 2.