A little over halfway through “The Exorcist: Believer,” Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) delivers what you might call the film’s thesis statement.
Decades after the events of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” Chris has made a name for herself as an expert in the subject of demonic possession and is called in to help when two young girls appear to be suffering from the same supernatural ailment that her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) suffered from all those years ago.
While trying to offer support to one of the girls’ fathers, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), she delivers quite a maudlin speech about the power of connection. The reason people go to church, she says, isn’t because of the church itself, but because of the connection it gives them to other people. And if Victor and the other girl’s family expect to survive this, they’re going to have to count on each other.
Given the severity of the situation Victor finds himself in, the sentiment is laughable. Burstyn delivers the monologue with sincerity – but that sincerity is immediately undercut by the fact that she’s delivering it from a hospital bed, suffering from horrific wounds that were inflicted by one of the aforementioned possessed girls just mere moments ago.
How Chris got those wounds is one of the only minorly graphic scenes in a film that is not particularly scary at all, especially when compared with the ways in which Friedkin’s film continues to unmoor and unsettle, even 50 years later. Director and writer David Gordon Green (the screenplay was co-written with Peter Sattler) does take a page or two out of Friedkin’s book, both in the construction of the film itself and its bleak conclusions about the world. It just doesn’t wield them nearly as sharply, its punishing nature turning its characters into something to scorn rather than pity.
Much like the 1973 film, “The Exorcist: Believer” begins outside of the United States. Victor’s wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) is killed during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti while the couple is on vacation. Sorenne was pregnant at the time, and Victor was asked to choose between saving his wife or his unborn child – one of two storylines having to do with pregnancy that feels unnecessarily cruel.
Thirteen years later, Victor lives alone with his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), and they don’t talk about Sorenne. That – and the fact that they appear to be the only non-religious people in a town full of zealots – leads Angela to ask her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) to help her commune with her mother through some sort of seance, inviting demonic possession into their lives.
When it comes to filmmaking, Green heavily borrows from “The Exorcist,” down to quick cuts and jarring sound mixing that makes even the happiest of laughs or a dog’s bark feel sinister. But whereas those choices in the original film serve to build an unnerving tension, in “The Exorcist: Believer” they often amount to nothing more than cheap jump scares. Funnily enough, the film is better able to achieve that level of discomfort when Green moves away from that style. There are a few quiet, still shots that linger on a room long after characters have left the frame, giving you the feeling that they’re being watched, allowing the audience’s discontent to grow organically.
Green also borrows from the original film’s grim outlook on the institutions that are supposed to protect us, in some respects trying to go even further than “The Exorcist” did in 1973. But those attempts to go further seem only more puritanical and more intent on punishing particular characters rather than pointing to any larger failing.
The evil represented here feels vague and often silly, tension-breaking laugh lines scattered throughout the film. Even in the moments where we’re confronted with a more familiar, benign sort of evil, the film obfuscates on its particulars. When Victor meets Katherine’s parents Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) for the first time, there’s an undercurrent of racism to their distrust and dislike of him that is never given any sort of credence. These are the people he is supposed to count on to help him save his child. How can he trust them not to fail him?
The answer is, he can’t. No matter what Chris MacNeil might say, “The Exorcist: Believer” rests its bones on the fact that people will fail each other. But for as hard as it tries, the film never manages to feel utterly hopeless. It doesn’t give you enough hope in the first place to be able to achieve that, and when it tries, the result is broadly saccharine. The screenplay baits and switches more times than you can count, far too many times to find any real sorrow, or anger, or truth. And when you play with your audience like that, Chris’s monologue in the hospital becomes something to scoff at rather than something to cling to.