The power of Blumhouse fails to compel you!

A single father and lapsed Catholic, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) raises his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) with all the love her deceased mother Sorenne (Tracey Graves) never got to give. With her dad still unable to talk about what happened all those years ago, Angela becomes obsessed with uncovering details about her mother, even talking her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) into trying to contact the dead in a secluded woodland across from their school. Both girls turn up together days after a manhunt to find them was started, neither having any memory of the days that passed. It isn’t long before their behavior suggest they’ve endured something horrific… or that something unnatural might have come back with them. Forming an uneasy alliance with Katherine’s devout Baptist parents Miranda and Tony (Jennifer Nettles, Jennifer Nettles), Victor’s need for answers leads him to former-actress-turned-author Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), a woman whose daughter Regan (Linda Blair) survived a similar incident. This time, it’ll take more than a couple of Catholic priests to defeat all the devil’s special effects, but hey, what’s the Lord of Lies been up to these days?

Director David Gordon Green graduated from stoner comedies like The Pineapple Express and Your Highness to franchise fare with a successful trilogy of new Halloween films, proving he could reinvigorate languishing intellectual properties for producers like Jason Blumhouse. Before his passing earlier this year, The Exorcist director William Friedkin reportedly lamented Green’s involvement with continuing the franchise, hoping not to be around to see it (he got his wish) and threatening to haunt him if there really was a spirit world (hmm.) Besides Exorcist III: Legion and maybe the first season of Fox’s “The Exorcist” 2016 television series, everything after the original film has been arguably hokey, derivative, and disappointing. By comparison, the 1999 film Stigmata is a superior example of treating Vatican vs. demonic possession as seriously as the subject matter would suggest, so it seems to be a matter of quality over quantity. Whether audiences asked to hear those infamous tubular bells again or not, Believer is here in the hopes of being the first of a planned trilogy, but can it even get out of the starting gate?

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world to keep making bad Exorcist sequels. Want to guess what The Craft: Legacy has in common with The Exorcist: Believer? They’re among the Blumhouse reboots that shouldn’t have been bothered with, usually bombing out hard in the third act — that’s you, too, Fantasy Island. The initial idea for Believer is intriguing, that any religion — or in this case, many religions simultaneously — could exorcise an unwanted entity from the innocent(s) it has attached itself to. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, it’s all window dressing to rehash Pazuzu’s greatest hits, squandering an interesting idea for a petty sequel setup that already seemed wholly unnecessary. When the most dangerous moment in your film is finding a snake under a rock — “No apple, Lucifer?” — the idea of two more of these sound exhausting. Seriously: a team of prayer ninjas who only attack one at a time?

The core story eerily emulates the tepid 2023 relaunch of the Haunted Mansion as the next Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but at least some of that was better than this. Both unfortunately took the same missteps convoluting the better story with silly side quests, but Blumhouse saved cash not casting celebrities for distracting bit parts. Side note: anyone seeking a possession story with a daughter reaching out into the great beyond to reconnect with a dead mom need look no further than A24’s exquisite Talk to Me. In contrast, the most watchable parts of Believer are Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill having big fun doing their Regan-inspired twinsies thing. The usual digital effects and some practical fake-blood carnage are all here, but so are translucent images flashed over footage to overloud audio stings — an effect borrowed from the original films that feels cheap and ineffective these days. Any goodwill earned in the trailers remains there, which wasn’t much to begin with — it’s that forgettable.

In spite of a lot of losing on the part of our designated heroes, there’s a hint of a twist at the end, but it’s clearly a setup since it’s never clear how these girls became targeted or how any of it plausibly ties into the MacNeils’ saga. Somewhere, a bullet-point script says “these things should happen,” but little of what happens moves the story along in any realistic way other than the screenwriter said so. If Blumhouse chooses to move forward with two more of these, it’s hard to imagine less enthusiasm about doing so… or it would have been before watching this first entry.

The Exorcist: Believer is rated R for some violent content, disturbing images, language, sexual references, and the curse of William Friedkin.

One skull recommendation out of four