The Exorcist: Believer (2023) Review

 "I didn't actually witness it, you know.  The exorcism."

-Chris MacNeil

Two girls go missing for three days, but are luckily found alive and mostly unharmed.  However, they soon begin exhibiting strange and demented behavior.  Their parents start to suspect the girls are demonically possessed and turn to all sorts of religious leaders for help, as well as Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), who knows a thing or two about exorcisms.

What Works:

The best part of this movie is the performances from the actors.  They are all trying their best and it isn't their fault the movie around them doesn't work.  Leslie Odom Jr. is the main highlight as he gives a really sympathetic and relatable performance as the main protagonist.

This movie has a few neat ideas.  I like how the movie begins with the girls going missing.  I think that could have been a whole movie of parents looking for their missing girls only to find the disappearances to be supernatural in origin.  I also like the idea of the exorcism involving priests from a wide variety of faiths working together.  That could have been a whole movie.  Unfortunately, neither idea is fully realized, but they had potential.

What Sucks:

I spent most of this movie either bored or annoyed.  That's about as bad as it gets for me when I'm watching the movie.  I had a hard time getting invested and I simply didn't care.  I was mostly preoccupied with all of the easy fixes that could have been made to make this a good movie.  Like I mentioned above, this movie has two solid ideas that each could have been their own movie if they had focused.  We could have had a supernatural version of Prisoners following the parents looking for their missing girls.  That could have been really creepy.

The other story is the exorcism itself.  We are introduced to a bunch of characters in this movie from a wide variety of faiths and they have to work together to defeat the demon.  This could have worked if we spend time developing each character and what their faith means to them.  Take a little bit from each faith and combine it to defeat the demon.  Easy.  Unfortunately, only two out of the eight characters involved in the ritual are developed at all, and one of those two is on the sloppy side.  If the movie had made the exorcism a larger part of the movie and focused on the characters' emotional journeys through the ritual, this could have been a nice and creepy character-focused horror movie.  Instead, it's a mess.

Chris MacNeil is a great character in the origianl movie, but she's actually barely in this movie.  Cut her out from the movie completely.  She didn't really add anything.  Or give her more to do!  Let her be at the final exorcism.  She's taken out of the movie quickly after being introduced and her inclusion felt pointless.

I'm not a religious person and a lot of the dialogue was very annoying as various characters spend the movie trying to jam religion down the throat of Odom Jr.'s character, Victor.  I was getting pretty fed up with all of the supporting characters and maybe if they had been better developed it would have been less annoying.  There's a whole second family involved in all of this and it's shocking how underdeveloped they are.  It's just bad writing.

Verdict:

This movie has a couple of neat ideas and talented actors and manages to waste all of them with terrible writing.  The characters are undeveloped and the story doesn't fully explore any of the interesting ideas.  The whole things feels like a waste.  I was bored and annoyed for most of the movie and the more I think about this movie, the angrier I get.  What a wasted opportunity.  It's better than the 2nd Exorcist movie, but not by much, and it's significantly worse than all of the other films in the series.

 2/10: Awful