After getting lost in the forest, two teenage girls return home possessed by the demon.
After spoiling John Carpenter’s lucrative franchise with Halloween Kills And Halloween Ends, here David Gordon Green screws up another famous horror film series. With The Exorcist: Believerthe director of the sympathetic Pineapple Express claims to be the direct sequel to the late William Friedkin’s masterpiece, The Exorciststill as appalling since its release in 1973. Spectators are therefore asked to forget the two sequels and, while they are at it, the two pre-episodes as well as the TV series, all inspired by the novel by William Peter Blatty.
Thirteen years after losing his wife, who died in childbirth during a trip to Haiti, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is overprotective of his daughter Angela (Lydia Jewett). Despite this, the teenager escapes into the forest with her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) in the hope of contacting her late mother. Three days later, they were found haggard and horribly injured. Their strange behavior soon pushes a religious nurse (Ann Dowd) to give Victor a copy of the book by Chris Macneil (Ellen Burstyn, what the hell was she going to do in this mess?), a former actress whose daughter underwent an exorcism 50 years ago earlier. You can guess what happens next, but perhaps not the scale of the disaster.
Following a very long and boring introduction and extracts from Tubular Bells, by Mike Oldfield, in muzak version, the ridiculously multi-faith double exorcism and against a backdrop of quickly evacuated racial conflicts to which David Gordon Green invites us seems very watered down in comparison with that of Regan (Linda Blair) in 1973. Certainly, the actresses sport hideous demonic masks and squirm as if they had the devil in their bodies, but the words that come out of their mouths are barely more filthy than those of any teenager in an existential crisis. Could Satan no longer say anything?
Like the makeup, the special effects prove convincing; There is a head that rotates 360 degrees, but it’s not the one we expected. Rehashing the codes of the genre without imagination, the director throws in almost subliminal images and a few shock effects that barely raise an eyebrow. And the worst part of all this is that we are announcing two sequels to this bland The Exorcist: Believer. Please stop the massacre!
Indoors
horror drama
The Exorcist: Believer (vf: The exorcist: the believer)
David Gordon Green
Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Ellen Burstyn
1:57 a.m.