AFTER spending US$400 million (RM1.9 billion) to gain the rights to The Exorcist franchise, you would think the people behind The Exorcist: Believer would be smart enough to make the right decisions to ensure the film would be good. Instead, this demonic monstrosity is currently parading around in cinemas, wearing the skin of William Friedkin’s legendary horror film.
However, this is not all that surprising to anyone in film circles as Believer was produced by Blumhouse Productions and directed by David Gordon Green. A production company known for making low-budget, high-profit generic mainstream horror films possessing the body of 1973’s The Exorcist for ill-gain is like poetry in motion.
Two girls and a possession
A legacy sequel of sorts to Friedkin’s film, Believer is centred on teenagers Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia Marcum). After going into a nearby forest to perform a ritual to contact Angela’s deceased mother, the girls go missing for three days before reappearing with no memory of what transpired during that time.
Not long afterwards, they begin to show signs of possession, forcing Angela’s widower father, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr) and Katherine’s parents, Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) and Miranda (Jennifer Nettles), to work together to save their daughters. Along the way, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) joins to help the parents.
A stuffed corporate turkey
Believer’s problems, at least with its storytelling, are fairly obvious from the very beginning.
The film is heavily skewed towards Angela and her father. In fact, it is almost a certainty that the original version of the studio pitch was only one girl being possessed, and when “What if two girls are possessed?” was proposed, studio executives most likely had their minds blown as their eyes rolled back to reveal dollar signs like a slot machine.
And so, Katherine and her family were tacked on as an afterthought because there is no character development or “her side of the story”. They are depicted as the typical white suburban Baptist Christians and that is really it.
The film does not even bother to explain why Katherine went with Angela to help her with the ritual and even Victor tells Miranda that he did not even know their daughters were friends. Problems then branch outward.
There is no time to establish the film’s drama involving the possessions because there are way too many characters.
Cruel desecration
By the third act, Believer has introduced an African rootwork healer, a Baptist pastor, a Pentecostal preacher, a failed nun-turned-nurse that tries to be a Roman Catholic priest and another character that is an actual Roman Catholic priest.
The Exorcist: Believer then becomes The Avengers. The film’s excess of characters and script fumbling show a fundamental misunderstanding of the original The Exorcist by Green and everyone involved, as they miss the forest for the trees.
Believer then goes further, committing a cardinal sin by bringing back Burstyn’s character, Chris, only to desecrate her in some rather broad strokes of atrocious writing.
Despite not being in the room during the exorcism in The Exorcist, Chris — in this film — is a self-avowed “expert on exorcisms”, and because she wrote a book detailing her ordeal involving Regan’s (Linda Blair) possession, her daughter has disowned her. And then she gets her eyes stabbed and goes blind.
No limits to idiocy
One of the many aspects that defined The Exorcist was its cinematography — the way Friedkin and cinematographer Owen Roizman framed and shot the film. The sequence of Regan “spider-walking” down the staircase, the appearance of the demon Pazuzu in the kitchen, the framing of Regan on her bed as her head spins around and even the outside stone stairwell.
These images stay with viewers long after the credits roll and have even endured the passage of time to become ubiquitous pieces of horror film history.
On the other hand, shot like a tepid daytime soap opera, Believer is devoid of anything memorable in its cinematography, as Blumhouse and Green go out of their way to be as lazy as possible.
Why are two girls being possessed if the camerawork (and horror) remain as dull as ever?
As horrifying as Believer was, not just as a film but as a sequel to what is universally known as one of the most famous films of all time, there is something much worse waiting to crawl out of the Hollywood hellscape - Universal Pictures plans to make a trilogy of these films.
