‘The Exorcist: Believer’ review: Not today, Satan

Director David Gordon Green’s weirdly cautious reboot of the “Exorcist” franchise, the first of a planned trilogy, comes with the name “The Exorcist: Believer.” And we do, insofar as believing in money is concerned.

Green recently wrapped up his “Halloween” trilogy, which started well enough, and made a lot. The second one went sideways, not collapsing, but the finale, “Halloween Kills” landed with a profitable thud as one of the more cynical exercises in oh, whatever in recent commercial filmmaking.

Can Green chart a different course with this trilogy? “The Exorcist: Believer” is the work of a talented, efficient mid-budget success story. There was a time when Green, whose career took a new path with the popularity of “Pineapple Express” in 2008, made tiny, idiosyncratic, unprofitable gems like “George Washington” and “Snow Angels.” I miss that David Gordon Green. I miss the eccentric assurance and enveloping sense of discovery of the earlier work. If he can somehow figure out, with the next two “Exorcists,” how to tap into that filmmaker again and make demonic possession more than a matter of hitting the marks and executing the jump scares (two or three excellent ones here, to be sure), then who knows? Maybe we’ll get movies that live and breathe.

The premise here, as spun out by co-writers Green and Peter Sattler, gets off to a good start and indeed, “The Exorcist: Believer” is pretty solid stuff for an hour. The prologue, set in Haiti, puts photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) in a miserable situation: After a horrifying earthquake, well-staged for street-level chaos and with minimal digital effects, doctors inform Victor that he can choose to save the life of his mortally wounded pregnant wife, Sorenne (Tracey Graves), or that of their unborn daughter. “Protect her,” Sorenne says, with her dying breath.

Thirteen years later, in a pleasant town in Georgia, Victor and daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) live a careful, methodical, emotionally bonded life. One fateful day after school, Angela and her churchy pal Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) venture into the woods, where they tra-la-la around with some spirit-conjuring and, for Angela, communing with her long-departed mother. Three days later, their parents out of their minds with panic, they’re found in a barn with no memory of where they’ve been or what has happened. The audience knows, though, because the audience has likely seen the “Exorcist: Believer” poster: a conscious throwback to Linda Blair’s demon face, this time with two possessed teenage girls instead of one.

Doubling the possession count, the movie zigzags to its finale, featuring various heartsick and distraught adults going up against the devil. “The Exorcist: Believer” throws in a Catholic priest for old times’ sake, but we’re dealing this time with a multidenominational crew of well-meaning amateurs. (It’s like a book club gone wrong.) The adults include Victor’s sullen neighbor, a nurse and onetime Catholic novitiate, played by Ann Dowd; Katherine’s true-believer Baptist parents (Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer Nettles); Victor’s Pentecostal friend Stuart (Danny McCarthy); and, from the sidelines, more or less, Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, the mother of poor Regan of the 1973 “Exorcist” that started all this.

Burstyn hasn’t done an “Exorcist” since director William Friedkin’s 1973 smash, and the way the storyline treats her return as Chris, you hope the payday was worth it. She’s welcome, to be sure, but she’s treated as callously as Jamie Lee Curtis’s character was in “Halloween Kills.” Many horror fans will likely roll with “The Exorcist: Believer” for a while; Green and his editor, Timothy Alverson, establish a nervous, abrupt cutting rhythm to both scenes of chaos and simple drop-the-kid-off-at-school moments. Green loves the slow zoom technique, very ‘70s, and a restlessly roving camera, so that you’re never quite sure if what we’re watching is an establishing shot or the beginning of a full scene, or a fake-out. In some ways, in fact, this film feels as if it predates “The Exorcist” by a year or two. The gore level isn’t likely what many in the target audience are hoping to find here because, after all, they found it in the original.

Everyone has their own context for this material; I write this as someone who believes the original Friedkin film was influential, yes, and indisputably a clever lesson in how to secure an R rating for an X-level amount of solemn depravity. (It helps to have a lot of Catholic advisers on your demon possession horror movie.)

To millions the world over, Friedkin’s film was far more than that. Clearly, director Green had no interest in trying to match the freakish extremes of what we saw in 1973. We will likely see more those extremes with the next two in the reboot trilogy. “The Exorcist: Believer” feels adequate, which is to say, disappointing; it works for a while, and then around the midpoint it starts not working, and the gang-exorcism climax really isn’t much of anything. As the film’s nominal lead, Odom appears to be stuck in neutral, underreacting in the guise of buried grief. A key supporting character, the root woman Dr. Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili), joins the fight against Satan when she’s most needed — but the visual conception and Gordon’s staging of the exorcism itself falters. And if there’s one thing die-hard fans of demonic possession want out of an “Exorcist” movie, it’s an exorcism worth its screen time.

In the years just before and just after the original ‘73 “Exorcist,” a vital handful of harsh, unsettling horror films went “too far” but justified every risk, miraculously, because of their style or, in some cases, a conscious lack of slickness. “Night of the Living Dead,” 1968. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” 1974. “Suspiria,” 1977. Those still mean something as screen horror. For millions, Friedkin’s film tops them all; inarguably, the special effects remain paragons of the pre-digital age. “The Exorcist: Believer” has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff. And the filmmaker in charge has to show us something new; there’s more to life, and moviegoing, than coasting on cherished memories of projectile vomiting and head-swiveling.

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'THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references)

Running time: 1:51

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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