No Amount of Prayers Can Save ‘The Exorcist: Believer’

As two of the masterminds behind Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green are responsible for some of modern television’s most outrageously uninhibited and amusing comedies. Regrettably, their attempts to revitalize classic horror franchises—first with their recent trio of Halloween reboot-sequels, and now with The Exorcist: Believer, the initial installment of a planned trilogy—leave much to be desired. Rehashing with the aid of original series stars, their scary-movie ventures play like creatively unnecessary and uninspired IP extensions, and that goes double for their latest, which brings back Ellen Burstyn for a tale of possessed kids and tormented adults that, for all the wrong reasons, proves hellish.

As with his Halloween efforts, director Green’s The Exorcist: Believer (in theaters Oct. 6) is a direct follow-up to the franchise’s maiden entry; all pre-existing sequels have been erased from its fictional timeline. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr.) takes snapshots on the beach as his pregnant wife shops at the market and is led by a child to a quasi-voodoo ceremony, where she receives “the most beautiful blessing of protection for Angela.” Unfortunately, while her unborn infant daughter is defended by a higher power, her mother isn’t, and in a subsequent earthquake, she’s critically hurt. Victor is told by doctors that he must choose between saving his spouse and his child—due to injuries that conveniently go unexplained—at which point the film cuts to present-day Percy, Georgia, where Victor is a single dad caring for middle-schooler Angela (Lidya Jewett).

Victor is close to Angela, if a bit clingy, and she considers it a triumph when she convinces him to let her stay out after school one evening with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum), the pious daughter of devout Catholic parents Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz). Once the bell rings, they wander off into the nearby woods, descend into a decrepit bunker-like structure, light candles, and begin a ritual designed to allow Angela to communicate with her deceased mother. When Victor returns home to discover that his daughter is MIA, he gets in touch with Miranda and Tony. After he hears that Katherine is also missing, he begins searching for the duo. Three days pass with no success, until some random farmer’s son stumbles upon them in a barn 30 miles from their last-known location, completely clueless about how they got there or how much time has passed.

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