THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER - Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The latest EXORCIST sequel isn't as bad as you've heard... but it's not great either.

Today the fastest growing religious group in America is “Spiritual/not religious.” The group has been steadily gaining ground in the Pew Research poll. In 2012 8% of Americans identified this way. In 2017 27% did. The next poll is due this year - they do it every five years - and I’m imagining that number has once again jumped. 

Good news for those folks - they finally got themselves a possession movie. The genre, which is fundamentally defined by 1973’s The Exorcist, has always been steeped in Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Church is the best church - at least if you’re making movies. Its aesthetic is gothic and grand, as opposed to the blandly beige worship halls of most Protestant denominations. Its ceremonies can be done in Latin, a language that calls to mind the occult and the mysterious. The priests dress dramatically in all black and the Church’s iconography is laser-focused on the bodily torture of Jesus Christ. Great stuff to put on a movie screen, just so much more captivating than most other Christian denominations. I’d say only Hindus and select Buddhist sects offer anything close to the visual bang for your buck. 

Ever since The Exorcist Catholic priests have been the ones casting demons out of children in our movies. Sure, there is an exception here and there, but generally speaking you’re getting a guy doing the Roman Rite while splashing holy water on a writhing body. In the latest entry in the Exorcist sequel sweepstakes, The Exorcist: Believer, David Gordon Green jettisons the Catholicism of it all and brings in an ecumenical spirit to the proceedings. If previous exorcism movies were drenched in Roman Catholicism, this one is politely wrapped in a Unitarian Universalist sheen. 

Let’s get one thing out of the way - the movie is fine. The level of vitriol directed at the film intrigued me, and I was hoping for either a disaster or, as was the case in the much-hated David Gordon Green Halloween Kills, a lowkey brilliance. I got neither; what I got was a movie that was perfectly okay, with some very good parts and some pretty bad parts and whose reach mostly exceeds its grasp. There’s very good stuff in here - the first half of the film apes the rhythmic editing of William Friedkin’s original to great effect - and the ending is truly great, a stellar moment in cinematic portrayals of the Father of Lies. 

And there’s bad stuff in here - a lot of the exorcist business is hokey as shit, and the structure of the movie is wonky, making it feel top heavy. It takes forever to get to the possession, and while the time spent before possession is used to create characters and relationships - as Friedkin did - Green doesn’t have the multiple storylines of the original to keep it feeling propulsive. In this one you don’t have a Father Karras parallel with Chris and Regan MacNeil, and you don’t have an investigation into church vandalism or anything of the sort. Green runs into a common problem in a film like this, one where we know what the horror element is going to be - we just kind of want to get to it. At the same time, you gotta establish these characters before you do bad things to them, and in the case of this movie you gotta establish a concept of making impossible choices to let the ending really pay off. It’s hard to navigate and I don’t think Green fully does. 

But for someone to say this is the worst Exorcist movie? Come on. Have you seen the two competing, non-compatible prequel films? Have you seen The Exorcist II: Heretic? If we’re talking movies in the franchise, The Exorcist: Believer is the third best. If we’re including the excellent TV show it’s fourth. But there are three Exorcist movies worse than this one, and not by any small margin. 

OK, from here on it's spoilers all the way down, so be warned. 

There is one thing that this movie does that I absolutely adore, and that feels in line with the ways that Green subverted fan expectations in his Halloween trilogy - much to the loudly expressed chagrin of said fans. He has his lead character, Leslie Odom Jr’s Victor, travel to visit Chris MacNeil, Ellen Burstyn’s character from the original film. In the years after Regan’s exorcism Chris has written a book about the experience and also become something of an exorcism expert - in line with the movie’s ecumenical identity she has studied exorcism rituals of all cultures, and she makes a point of telling us that every culture has their own version of it (this is true-ish, and true enough to not warrant picking apart in this context, but for audiences the idea of what an exorcism is, as portrayed in the media, versus what other cultures do when it comes to expelling negative energy or spirits, can be pretty different). 

So Victor, having made peace with the idea that his daughter is possessed despite his own atheism, goes and finds Chris, and he recruits her to his nondenominational team of exorcists - he gets a Protestant priest, a holy rolling Pentecostal, a Hoodoo rootworker and a Catholic priest - and brings her into the fray. She shows up triumphantly, goes to confront one of the possessed girls and immediately gets both her eyes stabbed out with a crucifix. When I tell you I was howling laughing - what an incredible idea, bringing in one of the beloved characters from the OG and building her up and wasting absolutely no time in blinding and sidelining her. A friend notes that Burstyn is 90, and having her laid up in a hospital bed for most of the runtime is likely the best way to make the experience bearable for her, but it’s just so hilarious to me. 

Anyway, in this movie two girls get possessed; they went out together into the woods to do a little casual spirit summoning and were abducted to Hell itself for three days before being returned with a hitchhiker onboard. I think it’s the same demon in both of them, which is pretty intriguing. Not clear if it’s supposed to be Pazuzu, the demon from the first film - Chris says “I know you” to it at one point, but I’m not totally convinced she’s correct - but the idea that one demon is possessing two girls is great, as far as I’m concerned. I think the more movies about the occult eschew basic physical realism the better - why would an incorporeal being be limited to just one body at a time? It’s also a nice reversal of the story of Legion from the New Testament, where Jesus goes to exorcise a guy and finds that he’s filled to the brim with multiple demons. 

At first you think that the two girl thing is just standard Hollywood inflation - you gotta put the S at the end of Alien for the sequel, don’t ya know. But what Green is doing here is actually clever and leads to the film’s excellent climax. To understand it you have to understand this fundamental aspect of The Exorcist - the demon didn’t care about Regan. The demon was possessing her in order to break the faith of Father Merrin, and he could have a little Karras a treat. What works in The Exorcist, and I mean works on an existential terror level, is the idea that all the demon wants is to break your spirit, to convince you there’s no hope, to turn you away from the light of God. The possessed is simply a means to an end, a pawn in a grotesque game that has nothing to do with her. This is the situation here as well - the demon is coming for the souls of those surrounding the exorcism, and it’s doing so by presenting a choice to the assembled. 

Choice is key in the film; the movie opens with Victor and his very, very (maybe too pregnant to fly?) wife in Haiti. Unfortunately it’s 2010, and the island is about to be rocked by a horrific earthquake; the wife is gravely injured in the collapse of her hotel and the doctors tell Victor that he has a choice to make - save his wife or save his child. 

Green’s good with this - he doesn’t show us the choice but he also doesn’t make it feel like he’s hiding the choice from us. He jumps ahead 13 years to Victor raising his daughter, Angela, and you think “Oh, he’s chosen the daughter. It’s what his wife would want him to do - her last words were ‘Protect her.’” But at the end we find out that wasn’t the case at all - the demon reveals to all assembled, including the possessed daughter, that he actually chose to save his wife. But she died and the baby lived, and he’s been existing with the emotional fallout of that ever since. 

Choice also comes into play with the other person the demon torments emotionally. Beloved character actor Ann Dowd plays Victor’s next door neighbor, a nurse who it turns out was days away from entering the convent. The thing is that she got pregnant, and chose an abortion and didn’t enter the sisterhood. This choice is one the demon torments her with - it makes her hear the cries of the baby at one point - and it has made some less… engaged members of the critical cognoscenti to claim the movie is anti-abortion. This is a deep misread of the film and the scenario; what is important is that the character has doubts about her choice, carries guilt about it. I am sure that among the most extremely online community the idea of having any regret about an abortion is heresy, but I can tell you from real life that it happens to even the most stridently leftist folks. It’s not an easy choice! And it’s always possible to second guess yourself, especially if you were, I don’t know, days away from entering a nunnery. To say the movie is anti-abortion is to say the movie is anti-saving your wife, because that’s the guilt the demon uses to torment Victor. We wouldn’t say he was wrong because the whole point is that he was confronted with an impossible choice. 

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t could be the tagline of the film. And this leads to the incredibly good finale, where a choice must be made. After a round of exorcism, which is visually striking (and also kind of stupid and shitty looking) the demon offers the assembled All-Faith Avengers a choice - one girl lives, one girl dies. Choose, they are told or both die. Another impossible choice, one that leaves you damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But for a while the parents of the girls remain resolute - they will not choose. They will defeat the demon in spiritual combat. 

And then the demon takes the head of the Catholic priest and, in an homage to one of the most famous scenes in The Exorcist, makes it spin. Except that unlike Regan this priest has a negative outcome, in which his neck is graphically snapped and he falls to the ground dead. It’s getting intense in there, and the father of the other girl - an angry man who earlier had been unwilling to take off his shoes as part of the exorcism - snaps .He chooses his daughter. 

But this is why the scenario is good - he’s dealing with the Devil, which is traditionally held to be a bad idea. The Devil isn’t giving you a fair choice here, and it turns out the demon never specified what you were choosing. Turns out you were choosing which girl dies. 

Brilliant! Excellent depiction of the idea of the Deceiver using half-truths to fool the unsuspecting and weak. Earlier I had thought the choice conceit was too pat, that it was too much like a hostage taker making demands. But Green and his co-writer Peter Sattler (with story credits to Green, Scott Teems and Danny McBride) put just the right spin on the ball, and the result is a great example of how there is no good choice in some situations. 

It’s interesting that the Ecumenical All-Stars don’t defeat the demon. The exorcism fails and the demon fully wins - it makes someone choose who dies. It then fucks off. This is even more nihilistic than the ending of The Exorcist, in which Father Karras willingly takes the demon into himself and commits suicide, all but guaranteeing he goes to Hell. But he’s willing to do it to save the innocent girl tied to the bed, and so even as it is a very dark ending it’s also hopeful. There’s not really much hope here; Green for some reason gives us an epilogue that shows characters going about their lives - he makes a nod at the fact that the police might find the whole exorcism scene suspicious but otherwise just shows people off being people. I kind of didn’t want this ending; it’s hard to imagine Angela going back to school after all of this. 

Green also doesn’t hit the nail on the head when it comes to the subtitle of the movie - Believer. The next film is supposedly called Deceiver, which is a better title for this one. Victor’s journey is not convincing to me, and I’ll tell you why - the main premise of faith, of being a believer, is not having proof. One of the things about these exorcism movies, especially in this one in which Hoodoo magic clearly and undeniably works, is that non-believers get very hard evidence of the supernatural. To become a believer in that context is meaningless; the mystery of faith is that you believe in what you can never know, what can never be proven to you. Faith cannot exist without doubt because if you are certain you know the truth you’re not exhibiting faith. Faith comes in the not knowing! When you have a demon talking through your daughter’s mouth, and when she has blisters on her feet from walking the burning plains of Hell for three days, doubt tends to dissolve. If there is a Biblical Hell there almost certainly is a Biblical God.

Now, ecumenical argument time - maybe the demon isn’t a demon. Like, maybe there is no Devil and no Hell. Maybe it’s just some kind of negative energy being that is dressing up in the clothes of Catholic concepts of Hell to scare us. This doesn’t mean there must be a God, it just means the being knows how to present itself within our dominant mythological structures. Maybe! But the movie doesn’t make that argument, and the fact that all of the denominations present at the exorcism - including Hoodoo, which is an African-American folk spirituality - have Christianity at their cores makes it seem like Green isn’t going that way. 

The movie makes hints at Victor once being religious - he is able to quote Ezekiel off the top of his head at the exorcism - but I think I would have liked to have seen that he was very religious before the death of his wife. Tragedies either reinforce faith - people rush to comforting beliefs - or they destroy it. The death of his wife gives Victor proof that God doesn’t exist, since how could God do this to him? Maybe this is too pat, but I think anything to deepen Victor’s character when it comes to faith and lack thereof would be helpful.

There are terrific ideas in the movie, and Green remains a very good filmmaker, but The Exorcist: Believer never rises above being perfectly okay. I’ll likely never watch this film again. Which is too bad, because the ideas Green is playing with - the impossible choice and how being confronted with such can be the ultimately demoralizing and faith-smashing moment of our lives - are rich. And when he is able to connect with them the movie works, but very often he’s not quite connecting and the movie is simply fine. But if you think this movie is worse than The Exorcist: The Beginning you may need to call an old priest and a young priest to your bedside to work some shit out.