The Exorcist: Believer – Movie Review
It’s baaaaaaad guys. It’s like the makers of this movie started writing a interesting story, but not even half way through they got bored and just threw some crap together. Everything gets progressively worse the longer it goes on. At one point it stops being any resemblance of scary and just turns comical.
Plot
The Exorcist: Believer begins in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, as photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) takes pictures of life on the beach. As he works, his pregnant wife, Sorenne (Tracy Graves), is left alone to explore different street venders and shops. People recognize her as being a foreigner, so she gets a lot of attention. As she is shopping, a young boy catches her attention and asks to take her someplace special, where she can get a blessing for her baby. The boy brings Sorenne to the home of what appears to be a voodoo practitioner who performs a ritual that Sorene later describes to Victor as “a beautiful blessing of protection for Angela.”
After reuniting, the couple walk to a large church so Victor can photograph it. Being heavily pregnant, Sorenne’s feet are hurting badly, and she can’t follow Victor up to the bell tower to take pictures of the city. They make plans for Victor to continue working while Sorenne takes a break back at the hotel where she can rest. Tragedy strikes soon afterward, though, as a sudden earthquake crumbels their hotel with Sorenne and countless others inside.
Victor rushes into the building, to find Sorenne crushed under debris. Before being taken to triage, her last wish is for Victor to protect their baby.
The aftermath of the earthquake is a hellscape of injured people and rubble. After attending to Sorenne, a doctor tells Victor that because of the injuries she has sustained, Victor will have to choose between saving his wife and unborn child. The scene cuts before we see what he chooses.
13 years later in Percy, Georgia, Victor is doing his best raising his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), as a single parent. The road hasn’t been easy, though, and along the way he lost his faith in God. Angela is struggling too, even though she’s trying to hide it. She longs for the relationship with her mother that she’ll never have. You get a sense for this as she goes through her mother’s pictures and then again when she tries to leave for school with her mother’s scarf. Victor gently reminds her that her mother’s items belong to him, and he wants to keep them safe. He takes the scarf and reminds Angela to be home from studying at her friend Katherine’s house by dinner.
At school Angela meets up with her friend Kathrine (Olivia O’Neill), only it appears the girls have plans other than doing homework. Angela has told her dad that she’s going to be doing homework at Kathrine’s, and Kathrine has told her family that she’s going to be doing homework at another girl’s house. After school instead of going to either of those locations, they sneak off into the woods together to perform a seance in the hope of communicating with Angela’s mother. Without the scarf from earlier to connect Angela to her mother, the seance goes terribly wrong and it’s unclear who, or what, the girls contact instead.
Nighttime rolls around and Angela still hasn’t come home. Victor begins to worry, and contacts Kathrine’s parents. They are also missing their daughter. A three day manhunt ensues with Victor and Katherine’s parents fearing for the worst. Eventually the girls are found in a barn and rushed to the ER. Thankfully, they appear to be mostly unharmed, only having some burns on their feet and being really traumatized. Strangely, they are unaware that they have been missing for 3 days and only think it has been a few hours. Their parents are just happy to have their kids back, though, and try to go back to life as usual.
This seems to work at first, but as time passes, the girl’s conditions continually worsen and weird things start to happen. Kathrine has a creepy outburst during her church’s communion, and Angela attacks her father then begins convulsing and is brought to the hospital. Panicking over the condition of their daughters, Kathrine’s mother, Miranda (Jennifer Nettles), begins voicing her concerns over the possibility of the girls having somehow traveled to hell and brought back a demon because their feet were burnt and they were gone for 3 days. Bit of a stretch, but this is getting into that magical part of the movie I warned you about earlier. You know, the part where any positives the movie had going for it die.
Angela and Kathrine keep getting worse until the adults have no choice but to perform a *dun dun dun dun* exorcism.
Is the exorcism successful? Are Angela and Kathrine both going to make it out alive? Are you going to be able to make it through the movie without laughing out loud? Find out by watching The Exorcist: Believer.
My Thoughts
After watching The Exorcist: Believer, I’m a believer that this franchise needs to die. Just let it rest in peace please.
So, I’ll admit that I came to this movie expecting it to be kinda bad. The ad for it was hot garbage and all the extra stuff they did to the girls to make them look “possessed” was pretty comical. I thought I might be wrong when I started watching the movie though. For the first 40 minutes or so the story was actually compelling. Sadly, the longer it went on, the worse it got. The ending was also pretty unsatisfying I thought at least. I kept thinking something else must be about to happen and then it just ended.
Now this isn’t all to say I regret spending nearly 2 hours watching this movie, it’s just that I really feel like the producers missed an opportunity to make it as good as it could have been. It did definitely have some good points in it, they just got a little buried in terrible prosthetics and comical demonic voices. All that being said, if you enjoy possession themed movies even when they get a little (in this case a lot) goofy, it might be worth adding to your movie list.
That’s it! Pop some popcorn, snuggle up on the couch, and check out The Exorcist: Believer! Let me know how you like it!
