If you've been yearning to watch a fitfully engaging attempt to reinvent a franchise, The Exorcist: Believer might be your kind of movie.
Director David Gordon Green, who added three latter-day installments to the Halloween franchise, stuffs his movie with elements that seem intended to update its reach but wind up diluting its power.
And who would have thought that the word of exorcism would be possessed by the need to give the whole business an interfaith gloss? Roman Catholic priests, long established as the devil's premier big-screen opponents, almost become an afterthought in this sometimes silly battle with the devil.
Fifty years ago, director William Friedkin made us believe that a foul force of hell could despoil the innocence of a child. An epic struggle of will and ritual played out in the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl, all of it fueled by the furor created by William Blatty's bestselling book.
Fair to say that Green adds a mildly secular flavor to the proceedings, delivering a message about the importance of working together to combat evil. It takes a village to beat the devil, I guess.
Green's most significant addition to the Exorcist canon involves dual possession. After a Haitian prologue in which Angela, one the demon's victims is born. Thirteen years pass and Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend Katherine (Olivia O'Neill) disappear in the Georgia woods.
A frantic search ensues. The girls eventually turn up. Of course, they've been possessed.
The cast includes Leslie Odom Jr. as Angela's widowed dad. His wife died while giving birth in Haiti. Displaying oodles of conviction, Anne Dowd appears as a nurse with a religious background; and Ellen Burstyn shows up to link this edition to the original. Believer is being billed as a direct sequel to the 1973 movie.
To fulfill that promise, Odom's increasingly desperate Victor visits Burstyn's Chris McNeil. He's seeking advice about how to save his daughter. Who would know better than the mom from the first movie?
Turns out Chris hasn't seen her once-possessed daughter in years; the two became estranged after Chris published a book about her experiences. Young Regan evidently didn't want to go public.
The second possessed girl hails from a churchgoing family, which affords Green an opportunity to show the disruption of a Sunday service. When the demon gets the best of poor Katherine, she marches down the church's center aisle growling about the body and the blood.
The two girls benefit from make-up, faux bad teeth, snarls, and the use of a familiar devil-like voice that sounds as if its gargling bile.
Green whips up a couple of jump scares, but what once was frightening sometimes feels like another fulfillment of genre obligations by the first of a reported trio of movies.
Some of the preview audience with which I saw Believer laughed as the movie fired off fan-oriented references. I guess certain kinds of horror have become less a source of big-screen terror than an occasion for in-group affirmation.
Oh well, nothing new here: If Believer succeeds, it won't be because of divine intervention: The power of box office will compel the franchise's present and future.
No comments:
Post a Comment