The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Leslie Odom Jr, Ann Dowd, Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair*

Have I Seen it Before: Well…

Did I Like It: And that’s not even the real problem. Sure, this is—in the broadest possible strokes—a rehash of the superlative The Exorcist (1973)—but there’s so much more here to annoy me.

Let’s say first that I had more than a little bit of anticipation for this film. I am one of those few people that have genuinely really liked all of Green’s Halloween trilogy (although I loved the first, and like the third better than the second), so I was probably one of the few remaining audience members that Green has yet to alienate.

Well, we’re here now. Is it all as bad as the series can get? No, it doesn’t have the almost willfully silly newage qualities of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), but it does get real close. Your reviewer nearly once attended seminary to become a Unitarian Minister, and even I got to a point with this film’s groaning attempts at to make an ecumenical team of exorcists really doesn’t hold a lot of water. The Catholics in the film are rendered as either hapless, meddlesome, or both. I’m not sure why that bothers me—indeed, that depiction of the modern Catholic church seems pretty apt, if a little cliché. It ultimately leaves the film so willfully antithetical to the spirit of the original story and leaves it just like every other pale exorcism-themed immitator of the last fifty years..

It also doesn’t help that the film can’t quite decide whether or not it wants to embrace its legacy or not piss anybody off.

I can’t help but wonder if this is Green attempting what Sam Raimi did with Spider-Man 3 (2007). He can’t want to keep making the same horror legacy sequel over and over again until the end of time, but they keep being reasonably profitable. He’s going to have to work hard—and possibly continue to work even harder still—to eithe get fired or not asked back for the continuation of this process.

*Spoiler, as she apparently got the same deal Mark Hamill got in Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015).

The Exorcist (1973)

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, Linda Blair

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. My most memorable screening is when I managed to convince someone who at that time was simultaneously a devout Christian and deathly afraid of demonic possession to watch it with me. Truly, the spirit of Pazusu was working through me.

Did I Like It: As we prepared to remedy a glaring blind spot in the canon of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, I decided to deep dive into the world of Lankester Merrin (von Sydow, for whom the old age make up may look fake at times but is a pretty decent approximation of the man he would become in his later years) and pals. I really enjoyed William Peter Blatty’s original novel, and especially Damien Karras (Miller) as a character, and unfortunately you might soon be subjected to my thoughts about the various Exorcist sequels (except for Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), because even I have my limits*).

And the act of going through the same story in the movie is fine. It hits all the right beats and manages to shake off some of the fat in the original story, but there is something missing in the translation. Such is life when comparing movies to their source material.

Where the movie succeeds wildly (and specifically either the unwieldly “Version You’ve Never Seen Before” or the Extended Director’s Cut) is in its ability to subtly unnerve. One might be able to find the occasional splicing in of Captain Howdy to be a bit of a parlor trick, but for me it is the best kind of cinematic horror. It’s the kind of thing that Murnau excelled at, around which The Blair Witch Project (1999) built an entire movie, and Muschietti occasionally tripped over in IT - Chapter One (2017), where you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking at sometimes, and it seems to live within the shadows which were the stuff out of which the earliest photography was made. That’s simple enough, but then you find yourself thinking about it that evening, and looking at the darkness in the distance as you’re feeding the cat, and before you know it, the movie has stuck in your mind.

*Although I’m not weirdly fascinated by it now. How do you make an early-oughts horror movie (with all of the requisite Matthew Lillard-ness that might entail) with these characters that a studio would feel comfortable releasing? The mind boggles, but that’s probably a discussion for a whole other review.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Cast: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Cybill Shepherd

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I have the most fleeting of memories of catching it on TCM at some point in the early `00s or late `90s. At the time, it didn’t really connect with me. That was likely because I was living through my own, twisted variation of the story at the time, in so much as I was young and so singularly obsessed with my life as it presented itself at that moment.

Did I Like It: It must have been difficult to be Peter Bogdanovich. He came to filmmaking by way of film history, and chiefly as an acolyte of Orson Welles. Here, he was viewed as a young auteur who may never outpace this early success. Toward the end of his career, he was still talking about Welles, and even committing his anecdotes to film, with The Cat’s Meow (2001). Here, too, he became so enmeshed in McMurtry’s world, that he left his wife for the ingenue he had discovered to play Jacy Farrow, the most calamitous temptress in southern literature since Scarlett O’Hara. He’s always been a filmmaker dictated to by others; a passenger in his own career.

But, as with the discovery of Shepherd, Bogdanovich is swinging for the fences in every aspect of the film. Ever actor is perfectly cast (I hesitate to single any particular performer out for attention, but I will say that when I read that Cloris Leachman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, I may have visibly nodded, even though no one was in the room at the time) The cinematography is stark, wielding the stark contrasts of black and white photography far more clearly than any color photography could ever hope to… It all brings to mind one other, young filmmaker who was able t ogive everything to a film so early in their career.

Even now, I can’t help but compare him to Orson Welles. It must have been hard to be Peter Bogdanovich.