Two young girls are possessed by an evil spirit and only Chris MacNeil knows how to help them.
After rebooting the Halloween franchise with a fresh trilogy, director David Gordon Green has decided to do the same with The Exorcist.
This supernatural thriller, which is a direct sequel to the 1973 original, focuses on single parent Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), whose teenage daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) goes missing in the woods with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum).
They emerge 30 miles away from home three days later and it is clear that something is very wrong with them.
The girls have been possessed by an evil spirit and need help to be freed from it. Enter Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), whose daughter Regan was possessed in the original movie.
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist was a shocking film and a game-changer for the horror genre when it was released in 1973.
It is a landmark movie that stills hold up and remains the benchmark for demon possession stories, which have been done to death (pun intended) over the past 50 years.
It was always going to be a challenge for Green to do that legacy justice with The Exorcist: Believer and he unfortunately fails to recapture what made the original so special.
There are still a few effective scares, wince-inducing body horror moments and plenty of terrifying visuals, but these could have gone a bit further.
The make-up on the girls is fantastically grotesque and there are clever practical effects, which are mainly showcased in the nail-biting exorcism sequence.
This final act is the most memorable of the film and almost makes up for the uneven pacing and excessive runtime.
Green’s biggest mistake is not giving Burstyn enough to do as MacNeil.
Recent horror franchise reboots always bring back a legacy character – Sidney Prescott in Scream and Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, for example.
MacNeil is the legacy character for The Exorcist franchise and horror fans will be disappointed that her talents are so wasted here.
Yes, Green wants to start a fresh story with new characters, but MacNeil should have been treated with more respect.
There are some highlights though – Odom Jr. grounds the story with his emotional performance, Jewett and Marcum are absolutely terrifying as the possessed girls, and Ann Dowd is terrific as Victor’s neighbour.
Given that there have been so many demon possession films over the years, it’s hard to present us with something we haven’t seen before. The Exorcist: Believer felt too familiar and unoriginal and it therefore fell way short of its original.
In cinemas from Friday 6th October.
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