Those Hollywood execs from 20 years ago smelled trouble when their Exorcist prequel wasn’t scary enough, but apparently there wasn’t that kind of oversight on Believer, which had some disturbing imagery but zero frights. The film also had a surprisingly predictable story despite being assembled from a carefully crafted list of “stuff The Exorcist movies haven’t done before,” including giving us a pair of girls possessed in tandem, and the idea that people of diverse religions should work together as a team to maximize their chances of chasing demons away.
That came at the expense of making the Catholic priest character forgettable and useless (unless being “the character whose head spins around” counts as useful), when the best entries in the franchise have all examined how performing exorcisms and dealing with dark forces in general makes priests re-examine their own faiths in fascinating ways.
Believer had a great cast—Leslie Odom Jr. and Ann Dowd especially, though Norbert Leo Butz as a bitchy evangelical who has no idea how to deal with his tween daughter (even before she’s possessed) is also notable. It was great to see Burstyn reprising Chris MacNeil… it wasn’t so great that her eyes got stabbed out early on, meaning she spent most of the movie psychically reacting to events by writhing blindfolded in her hospital bed. She’s a beloved legacy character, and she came back 50 years later for that?
