After getting lost in the forest, two teenage girls return home possessed by the demon.
After spoiling John Carpenter’s lucrative franchise with Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, David Gordon Green is ruining another famous horror film series. With The Exorcist: Believer, the director of the friendly Pineapple Express intends to sign the direct sequel to the masterpiece of the late William Friedkin, The Exorcist, still as frightening since its release in 1973. Spectators are therefore asked to forget the two sequels and, while we’re at it, the two prequels as well as the TV series, all inspired by the novel by William Peter Blatty.
Thirteen years after losing his wife to childbirth during a trip to Haiti, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is overprotective of his daughter Angela (Lydia Jewett). Despite this, the teenager escapes into the forest with her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) in the hope of contacting her late mother. Three days later, they were found haggard and horribly injured. Their strange behavior soon prompts a religious nurse (Ann Dowd) to give Victor a copy of the book by Chris Macneil (Ellen Burstyn, what the hell was she going to do in this mess?), a former actress whose daughter underwent an exorcism 50 years ago earlier. You can guess what happens next, but perhaps not the scale of the disaster.
Following a very long and boring introduction and extracts from Tubular Bells, by Mike Oldfield, in muzak version, the ridiculously multi-faith double exorcism and against a backdrop of racial conflicts quickly evacuated to which David Gordon Green invites us seems very watered down in comparison with the by Regan (Linda Blair) in 1973. Certainly, the actresses wear hideous demonic masks and squirm as if they had the devil in their bodies, but the words that come out of their mouths are barely more filthy than those of any teenager in existential crisis. Couldn’t Satan say anything more?
Like the makeup, the special effects prove convincing; There is a head that rotates 360 degrees, but it’s not the one we expected. Rehashing the codes of the genre without imagination, the director throws in almost subliminal images and a few shock effects that barely raise an eyebrow. And the worst part of all this is that we are announcing two sequels to this bland The Exorcist: Believer. Please stop the massacre!
