Director: David Gordon Green

Starring: Leslie Odom Jr, Lidya Jewett, Olivia O’Neill, Ann Dowd, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ellen Burstyn

Potential triggers: Demonic possession, gouged out eyes, missing children, snakes, death of spouse, child death, miscarriage, psychiatric hospitals, sexual assault references, jump scares, kids generally behaving like dicks

MIRANDA: “Do you know where Jesus went after he died on the cross, Victor? He went to Hell to declare his authority over the devil. And he re-appeared three days later. Three days. Just like our girls.

VICTOR: “You think they went to Hell? Burned their feet in Hell? Got possessed by the devil?

TONY: “Pagan activity. Or talking to the dead. Wherever those girls went, they brought something back with them.”

It’s been a while since I reviewed a film – life got in the way – but now that my kid’s not a baby anymore and now that life is settling into a normal routine I can finally get back to watching horror films at night again, after more than half a decade on the sidelines.

Given that The Exorcist is one of my favourite films of all time, it stands to reason that upon my return to horror I made a bee-line for The Exorcist: Believer, the sixth film in the series but one of the few that serves as a direct sequel to the original.

While I wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near as good as the original – and my expectations were correct – it still did enough to keep me engaged throughout.

The film follows Victor Fielding (Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr), who in an opening flashback loses his pregnant wife in an earthquake in Haiti. The baby is saved, and we then flash forward to the present day, 13 years later, where Victor and daughter Angela are living a happy life.

Naturally, Victor is extremely protective of Angela because he doesn’t want anything to happen to her. One day he finally relents and lets her go studying at a friend’s house before dinner, but it turns out his intuition was right because Angela and her pal Katherine don’t go home: instead, they go into the woods, where they promply disappear. Slenderman’s got a lot to answer for.

As luck would have it for Victor, and Katherine’s parents, the girls are found three days later in an extremely traumatised state, with their feet all messed up and no idea how long they’ve been gone (Angela thinks it’s been a couple of hours).

Has someone done something to these kids in the woods that’s left them so traumatised that they’re blocking out what happened? Someone… or someTHING? Dum dum DUMMMMM.

It’s something, is what I’m saying. The devil, specifically. It’s The Exorcist, after all.

Cue a sort of semi-remake of the original film, this time with two girls instead of one, in which it eventually becomes clear that demonic possession is the diagnosis here and an exorcism is the order of the day.

One thing The Exorcist: Believer does that I find interesting is it makes the process more complicated. This is no longer a case of getting a couple of priests in and leaving them to it: the addition of the second kid and her parents add a new dynamic which threatens to upend things (and eventually does, without spoiling anything).

In the original movie, Ellen Burstyn’s character wasn’t religious at all and had to be convinced that an exorcism was needed. This time, the two families sit at very different ends of the divide. Victor used to be a religious man, but completely lost his faith after what happened to his wife in Haiti and no longer believes. Katherine’s parents, meanwhile, are devout Baptists and easier to convince that the girls have been possessed, but bring their own problems to the table (not least the dad being a dick).

The gimmick here is that while the first film’s exorcism was performed by two Catholic priests reading from the Roman Ritual, this time there’s a ‘too many cooks’ situation where the ritual is a room full of parents, religious figures and neighbours: they all mean well and want to help, but they’re all bringing their own solution to the table and it gets messy (literally and figuratively).

As well as the local Catholic priest (who’s been asked to help despite his local diocese forbidding it), Katherine’s parents have brought in their Baptist pastor, and a Pentecostal preacher has been roped in too, along with a rootwork healer who practices Hoodoo and proceeds to fill the bath with flowery water. It’s basically the grand final of Purgatory’s Got Talent.

Ultimately, what started as a slow-paced, tense and genuinely compelling film about two missing girls and finding out about the trauma they suffered, turns into a big dumb spectacle as special effects are projectile vomited into the viewer’s eyes.

Indeed, it gets so ridiculous that when one of the girls starts floating – one of the most jaw-dropping moments of the original movie – it barely registers here before we’re back to breathing fire on ghostly clouds and spewing fountains of blood into a portal in the ceiling. Or something. I lost track of what was going on a bit.

Believer dances around potentially interesting sub-plots but never really fully investigates any of them. Victor approaches the underground nook in the forest where whatever happened to the girls clearly took place, but other than the odd flashback we don’t see much more of it.

Nurse Ann’s tragic past is briefly brought up by the demon, but the psychological mind-games that could have followed this during the exorcism are relegated to a brief few lines as the crowd in the room take turns lining up for their encounter with the demon, like a verbal version of a kung fu movie.

It could also have done with an extra 10 minutes at the start to establish the characters more. The film does a good job of getting across the relationship with Victor and his daughter Angela, and you do genuinely care about them both, but Angela and Katherine’s friendship is barely touched on.

Given that this time the central focus is how the demon is using the friends’ bond to possess them both, the film would have benefited by spending a bit more time with them at first, showing us them just being friends together at school, maybe with Angela sharing some heartfelt conversation about having never met her mother (something which becomes a crucial plot point).

Even the return of Ellen Burstyn, which is initially brilliant, falls flat a bit as she’s dumped out of the film fairly quickly and doesn’t get a chance to shine. The one scene she gets to share with the demon is the best in the film, but then she’s quickly sidelined for the rest of the movie with only fleeting appearances.

The Exorcist: Believer was seemingly an attempt by Universal and Blumhouse to make lightning strike twice. Back in 2018, they partnered to release a reboot of Halloween, which was directed by David Gordon Green, co-written by Green and Danny McBride, brought back its iconic star Jamie Lee Curtis, and went on to enjoy success as a reboot trilogy.

This time they partnered again – with Universal spending $400 million to acquire the Exorcist IP – with Green in the director’s chair again, Danny McBride co-writing again and the repeated twist of bringing back one the series’ most loved actors in Burstyn. The plan, again, was to turn this into a trilogy – and the final scene, which now serves as mere fan service – was seemingly a hint at what was to follow.

Instead, after Believer was critically panned, its sequel – The Exorcist: Deceiver, which was planned for April 2025 – was scrapped and now it turns out the franchise is being completely rebooted.

The problem is, while slasher movies are relatively timeless and it’s not difficult to bring Michael Myers back in the 2010s and 2020s while delivering the same sort of stabby, scary shocks that delight teenage and 20-something audiences, The Exorcist was very much a movie of its time and the numerous attempts to revive it over the years – not to mention its countless imitators – fail to capture the initial impact.

Certainly, while my downtime from horror films means I’m not as well-versed in Blumhouse’s output as I’d like to be – something that will change on this site in the coming months and years – I’m still aware that it specialises in making lower-budget horror films that give its directors more creative freedom. But even with this reputation, it couldn’t resist turning this one into a fireworks show at the end.

In a sense, Believer suffers because that’s the subtitle, not the main title. As a standalone horror film it may have been better received, but The Exorcist name is a monumental one to live up to – a curse rather than a blessing, if you will (and why wouldn’t you) – and so it was always going to attract comparisons to one of the greatest horror films ever made, a battle it was never going to win.

It’s a perfectly fine way to pass a couple of hours, and while it does get quite hokey by the end, the first half and the overall performances mean that it’s still worth a watch, as long as you don’t expect anything that’ll cause your head to spin.

How can I see it?

At the time of writing The Exorcist: Believer can be watched as part of NowTV’s Cinema package. Alternatively (or if you stumble on this review further down the line), visit The Exorcist: Believer page on JustWatch UK or JustWatch US to find out all the places you can stream or rent it.

Show me the trailer: