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With: Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Lidya Jewett, Olivia Marcum, Ellen Burstyn, Tracey Graves, Okwui Okpokwasili, Raphael Sbarge, Danny McCarthy
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Written by: Peter Sattler, David Gordon Green, based on a story by Scott Teems, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
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Directed by: David Gordon Green
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MPAA Rating: R for some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references
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Running Time: 111
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Date: 10/06/2023
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The Exorcist: Believer (2023)
Angels & Demons
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
As he did with Halloween (2018), director David Gordon Green pays homage to a 1970s classic with just enough new touches to bring it up to date; it may be unnecessary, but it's mostly entertaining.
Professional photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is in Haiti with his pregnant wife (Tracey Graves). From some local women, she receives a blessing for her baby, but is then fatally injured in an earthquake. Thirteen years later, back in the States, overprotective Victor and daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) try to make the best of things. Angela asks to spend the afternoon with a friend, Katherine (Olivia Marcum), and Victor reluctantly agrees.
Rather than doing homework however, the girls head out to the woods to perform a ritual to contact Angela's dead mother. Later, the girls fail to return home and are missing for three days. When they're found, they seem… odd. Soon, they are speaking in demon voices, saying secrets that no one on earth could know. It's clear that they are beyond a doctor's help, and so Victor arranges for a ceremony that could prove deadly.
The overarching feeling of The Exorcist: Believer is: why is it here, other than a financial gambit based on the success of Green's Halloween movies? It doesn't do much different than any other demon possession/exorcism movies of the past fifty years, and, frankly, it doesn't even have an exorcist in it.
But Green seems to have put a lot of care and attention into his movie, offering a revamped version of the creepy "Tubular Bells" theme music, and working in a decent homage to director William Friedkin's eerie sound design on the original The Exorcist (1973), a smashing-together of quiet moments and sudden sounds. It's also refreshing to see a movie that opens its arms to various faiths (or even lack of faith).
Likewise, the casting is first-rate, with Odom Jr. and Ann Dowd providing strong emotional moments, and not to mention the return of Chris MacNeil, with the great Ellen Burstyn reprising her Oscar-nominated role five decades later. Like all the sequels in this franchise, The Exorcist: Believer falls well short of the original, but still offers enough atmospheric horror to turn heads.
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