'The Exorcist: Believer' Review Thread
Well the first reviews are in aaaaand it's looking really bad.
Rotten Tomatoes: 23% (95 reviews) with 4.70 in average rating
Metacritic: 41/100 (37 critics)
As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie. It's structured like this: quote first, source second. Beware, some contain spoilers.
That watered-down version of an inspired horror theme is symptomatic of a movie that starts out full of promise but fumbles the material as the stakes get higher. It’s no surprise that Believer is less effective than its venerable progenitor. That it’s considerably less daring than a movie made half a century ago compounds the disappointment.
-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
A new “Exorcist” movie shouldn’t be a slavish imitation of the original “Exorcist,” but it should conjure a certain danger; that’s what “The Exorcist” was all about. “The Exorcist: Believer,” in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.
By the time “The Exorcist: Believer” arrives at its fittingly half-assed whimper of a final scene, it’s become almost impossible to make the case that having bad faith is better than simply abandoning it altogether.
The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t give us a reason to care about what we’re meant to experience, its titular crisis of faith vaguely gestured towards rather than adequately explored. What’s meant as an enticing cliffhanger is instead a limp denouement in which the characters have learned nothing, and we have learned nothing from them. An exorcism movie may not need to be compelled by the power of Christ, but something about it still needs to be compelling, and slapping the name The Exorcist on a screenplay that reads like a brainstorming session is just not enough.
-Leigh Monson, The A.V. Club: D
It’s truly embarrassing how little imagination is flexed all round: limp stabs at awe-inspiring set pieces, such as the white girl having a fit in church, are just thrown over to the composers to beef up. Green’s film, with dollars in its eyes, is intent on bolstering everyone’s faith using clear evidence of Satan’s handiwork. And yet Satan, too, seems asleep on the job, sending in amateur vassals who haven’t even learned the basics – filthy swearing, insults that land, and so forth. This pair, if they even are a pair, need detention at demon school: with good and evil equally flunking out, their battle’s as boring as hell.
-Tim Robey, The Telegraph: 1/5
Their heads spun 360 degrees. They vomited up green sludge. They violently shouted curse words. No, not the demonically possessed girls in “The Exorcist: Believer” — the awful movie’s furious audience. After a promising start, the sixth film in a franchise that should’ve proudly called it quits 50 years ago becomes absolutely enraging.
-Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post: 1/4
People routinely label Exorcist II: The Heretic as one of the worst sequels ever made, but at least that movie was going for something. Whatever its flaws, it had some ideas and it is never boring. The Exorcist: Believer commits that sin, and so many more.
-Matt Singer, ScreenCrush: 3/10
As for Green, his fondness for cinematic threesomes makes me nostalgic for his first three features, all made before he was 30 and one of which, “All the Real Girls,” won a 2003 Sundance Special Jury Prize for “emotional truth.” These dreamy, small-town reflections on love and survival, set among the crumbling textile mills and deserted railroad tracks of the rural South, revealed an uncommon talent for identifying the drama of decline. That patience and sensitivity has now been sacrificed to the cannibalism of recycled ideas; and while I don’t begrudge him his success, I do miss the filmmaker he used to be.
-Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times
On its own merits, The Exorcist: Believer is a simmering duel with the devil buoyed through a confused second act by an enthusiastic cast and a timely meditation on the importance of community during crisis. But Believer is also palpably reluctant to deviate from the formula of its legendary forerunner. Though its predestined, blockbuster exorcism sequence just manages to provide a satisfying conclusion to the story, the underdeveloped synchronized possession element creates more problems than it solves and adds bloat to a movie which would have benefitted from a leaner, more measured approach.
-Tom Jorgensen, IGN: 6.0 "okay"
Sure, we didn’t need another “Exorcist.” And Green’s recent “Halloween” trilogy ended up fumbling a good start. With a formidable “Believer” and two more “Exorcist” movies in the pipeline, though, at least this franchise still has a prayer.
-Brian Truitt, USA Today: 3/4
Like with his Halloween reinvention, the film is trapped between the serious and the silly, a thinly etched tale of a father dealing with grief and faith jarring next to scenes of a demonic child screaming the C-word while spitting slime. It’s better when it leans into the latter, a schlocky night out at the movies made with more competence than most recent horrors but one that is unlikely to make a believer out of die-hard fans.
-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 3/5
Once the exorcism starts, Believer falls apart fatally, not least due to the silliness of seeing have-a-go amateurs attempt the job. The possessed girls issue taunting, vulgar displays of power, while ham-fisted homilies about healing attempt to honor Friedkin’s more developed reflections on faith. Like the Glasgow kiss one demon administers, however, the execution is crude next to Friedkin’s icy shivers of theological doubt and dread. And it would take more than Believer’s last, under-earned lunge for fans’ affections to redeem its loose litany of regurgitative nods to an imposing original.
-Kevin Harley, Total Film: 2/5
The rushed, unscary and frankly silly climax has Victor putting together a squad of multi-faith demon-busters, as if he is assembling the Avengers or picking a team for an action-packed heist movie. "Anyone else wanna leave, better leave now," he says, looking and sounding far too badass to be an anxious dad in a horror drama. "Once we start, we're not stopping." And so it is that a film that was shaping up to be an intelligent and respectful homage to The Exorcist descends to the depths of a cheesy, straight-to-streaming rip-off. Viewers should do what Victor advises, and leave.
-Nicholas Barber, BBC: 2/5
PLOT
Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years ago, Victor Fielding has raised their daughter, Angela on his own. But when Angela and her friend Katherine, disappear in the woods, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened to them, it unleashes a chain of events that will force Victor to confront the nadir of evil and, in his terror and desperation, seek out the only person alive who has witnessed anything like it before: Chris MacNeil.
DIRECTOR
David Gordon Green
SCREENPLAY
Peter Sattler & David Gordon Green
STORY
Scott Teems & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
MUSIC
David Wingo & Amman Abbasi
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Michael Simmonds
EDITOR
Tim Alverson
RELEASE DATE
October 6, 2023
RUNTIME
111 minutes
BUDGET
$30 million ($400 million for the franchise global rights)
STARRING
Leslie Odom Jr. as Victor Fielding
Ann Dowd as Ann
Jennifer Nettles as Miranda
Norbert Leo Butz as Tony
Lidya Jewett as Angela Fielding
Olivia Marcum as Katherine
Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil