An unholy disaster

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This article was published 06/10/2023 (895 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

William Peter Blatty, who scripted the original, influential and — it turns out — inimitable 1973 horror classic The Exorcist, believed in good and evil, God and the Devil.

Subsequent exorcism movies have tended to treat satanic possession as metaphorical, and that’s fine, but you need to decide what the metaphor means.

This soggy, logy legacy sequel can’t quite decide what it wants to say.

It doesn’t even know how it wants to say it, functioning neither as cerebral high-brow horror nor visceral B-movie shlock. Stranded listlessly between these two modes, it retains the original movie’s long, slow leadup without being able to summon any of the original’s pervasive sense of dread and alienation.

Then it goes gross and graphic without being scary or shocking.

Even worse, the whole thing is straining mightily for generic, Hollywood-approved uplift, with an obvious and oddly peppy message about the need for community and connection.

While that’s a lovely idea for, say, an underdog sports story or an inspirational biopic, it feels out of place in a genre where people’s heads can turn 360 degrees.

Director and co-scripter David Gordon Green (the man behind the recent Halloween trilogy) opens with an immediate callback to the ’73 movie, with an image of two dogs fighting on the streets of Haiti.

But the film also wants to declare itself independent and updated, so that rather than viewing a foreign country as the origin of unknowable evil, here photographer Victor (Leslie Odom Jr. of One Night in Miami and Hamilton) and his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) are trying to immerse themselves in Haitian culture, with Sorenne taking part in a Vodou protection ceremony for her unborn child.

After a devastating earthquake, the story jumps ahead. Victor is now living in a small town in Georgia, a grieving widower raising his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett).

Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) are just on the cusp of puberty. (Katherine is wearing lip gloss, and her father is not happy.) The two girls tell their parents some little lies — they’ll be studying together after school — and instead head into the woods.

Lost for three days, the girls come back with burnt and blistered feet and no memory of what has happened.

Anyone who’s seen an exorcism movie know what’s going to happen next.

The previously sweet Angela and Katherine begin to display disturbing behaviours, and soon these young girls have turned into sites of filth and fury, with cracked lips and growling voices, spewing foul language, insinuating knowledge and green slime.

The medical community is baffled, except for one nurse, Ann (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Ann Dowd), who almost became a nun. She urges Victor, a sceptic who has lost all faith since his wife’s death, to seek out a woman who might be able to help, Chris MacNeil (played by Ellen Burstyn, the star of the 1973 film).

Chris explains — and several characters reiterate, just in case — that exorcism is a cross-cultural phenomenon, with examples reaching across time, place and belief systems.

Thus, in the attempt to save the girls, a concerned Catholic priest is joined by a Baptist pastor, a Pentecostal believer, as well as a practitioner in rootwork, a form of folk healing.

That’s admirably ecumenical — and who doesn’t like some interdenominational outreach in these divisive days? — but in narrative terms, this exorcism-by-committee approach ends up feeling flat, vague and impersonal.

The script — Green collaborated with Scott Teems, Peter Sattler and Danny McBride — also has that diluted, compromised committee feel. Odom Jr. does what he can to ground the story in the figure of a terrified father, but the film is a waste of the wonderful Dowd, and worse than a waste of Burstyn, with an ugly misuse of her character.

The direction has moments of craft, including a few well-executed jump scares, but overall, it feels as if Green has made his own kind of deal with the devil. (The power of cash compels him?)

The American auteur entered the scene with 2000’s George Washington, a personal, imagistic indie drama. Even when he started to go mainstream, Green still managed to do interesting work. (Pineapple Express, for instance, is maybe the best stoner action movie ever made. A niche genre, but still.)

Green’s take on the Halloween franchise was intriguing but frustratingly uneven. Here he loses even that residual intrigue. Unfortunately, as with Green’s 2018 Halloween, The Exorcist: Believer is planned as the first instalment of a trilogy.

God help us, or — as the carefully nonthreatening script might say — you know, whoever.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com