The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

Directed by David Gordon Green. Starring Leslie Odom Jr., Lidya Jewett, Olivia O’Neill, Ann Dowd, Norbert Leo Butz, Jennifer Nettles, Raphael Sbarge, Okwui Okpokwasili, E. J. Bonilla, Ellen Burstyn, Danny McCarthy, Tracey Graves. [R]

The fifth installment in the Exorcist franchise (or sixth, depending on how you count the alternate versions of the same basic story that are Dominion and The Beginning) remodels the maneuvers of the first film for a blundering misfire without any of the fresh ideas David Gordon Green (sometimes) brought to his Halloween sequel trilogy. Two girls wander off into the woods for a séance and go missing for three days, although in the disoriented condition in which they’re found, they think it had only been a few hours. Needless to say, they’re not the same girls they were before, as they’ve both been possessed (simultaneously, I guess) by a demon. Despite the best efforts by Leslie Odom Jr. as the faithless father of one of the girls, and the return of Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil to the series (more gratuitous than grateful), this would-be scary movie flounders too much to even serve as a passable time-killer for fans of William Friedkin’s superbly immersive original. Suffers from awkward shot selections galore, plus several wigged-out editing choices and unintentional laughs (“The body and the blood! The body and the blood!”), and a certain misunderstanding of its own title—there are myriad exorcists, introduced too late in the story, none of whom are well-considered or compelling, making a “believer” out of no one with even an iota of common sense. The final-act exorcism scenes—where the movie should be peaking—are especially limp, a procession of familiar old tricks and bizarre new ones (um, two stink smoke clouds battling for supremacy?), leading to a fateful choice being made by the parents of the possessed children, and the predictable results that follow. Linda Blair served as an on-set consultant for the actresses playing the possessed girls, and makes a cameo appearance at the end.

33/100