The Exorcist: Believer is less a horror movie and more a very expensive séance where a studio tries to summon the spirit of a masterpiece and instead gets… whatever this is. If the original Exorcist is a sacred text of horror cinema, Believer is the tie-in coloring book somebody left out in the rain.
It’s not totally incompetent—there are solid actors, a few nice shots, and some isolated creepy moments—but as a legacy sequel to one of the greatest horror films ever made, it plays like a $400 million corporate midlife crisis.
The Devil Went Down to Georgia (For Some Reason)
We open in Haiti, because of course we do. Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his pregnant wife Sorenne are honeymooning when an earthquake hits, leaving Sorenne gravely injured. A paramedic tells Victor he must choose: save his wife or his unborn child.
It’s a huge, gut-wrenching moral dilemma… that the movie then weaponizes later like a cheap twist on a game show. Also, apparently medical staff in this universe just casually outsource life-or-death triage to random husbands in the rubble.
Thirteen years later, Victor lives in Georgia with his daughter Angela, whose very existence is an unresolved trauma knot. Victor has abandoned his faith—he’s not angry at God so much as he just unsubscribed from the whole newsletter.
Angela and her friend Katherine decide to go into the woods to perform a séance to contact Angela’s dead mother, because modern horror law requires all teen girls to either start a podcast or dabble in occult nonsense. They vanish for three days, then reappear in a barn with burned feet and fractured memories.
So far, so decent. The premise is fine. The problem is what happens next: a lot, and yet somehow very little.
Double Possession, Half the Impact
Instead of one possessed girl, Believer gives us two: Angela and Katherine. In theory, this should raise the stakes—double the demonic chaos, double the spiritual dread. In practice, it mostly leads to a lot of cross-cutting between two similar storylines, both of which feel thinner because they’re sharing the runtime.
The girls’ deterioration checks every demonic possession box: strange voices, contorted bodies, secret knowledge of people’s sins. They snarl, they taunt, they puke theology at adults. But nothing ever feels particularly shocking or transgressive. The original Exorcist felt dangerous; Believer feels like it’s reenacting scenes from a training manual called “So You’ve Got a Demon.”
The demon itself is weirdly bland. There’s no strong personality, no memorable verbal sparring, no terrifying sense of a specific entity. It’s just Generic Evil Voice™, occasionally spitting out personal details like a very mean psychic.
The “Believer” Part: Faith by Plot Convenience
Victor’s whole arc is supposedly about losing and regaining his faith. The movie keeps telling us this is important, but it never really shows us that struggle in a meaningful way. He’s basically: “I used to believe. Then my wife died. Now I don’t. Anyway, how’s your day?”
When the climax demands that he rediscover prayer and spiritual strength, it doesn’t feel earned. It feels like someone flipped a “Character Development” switch because the third act needed it. His return to prayer is supposed to be powerful; instead it’s more like, “Oh right, I remember the words, cool.”
Leslie Odom Jr. does what he can with the material—he’s a genuinely compelling actor—but the script gives him a character arc that’s essentially an outline instead of a journey.
Chris MacNeil Deserved a Lot Better Than This
Now we get to the legacy stuff.
Ellen Burstyn’s return as Chris MacNeil should be an event. In horror terms, this is royalty walking back on the stage. Instead, the movie treats her like an extremely famous piece of fan service it doesn’t quite know what to do with.
Chris has written a memoir about what happened to Regan and has spent her life studying exorcism in cultures around the world. This could have been fascinating: the mother of a famously possessed child becoming a global expert on spiritual warfare.
Instead, she’s parachuted into the plot mainly to create a bridge back to the original, deliver some exposition, and then get promptly stabbed in the eyes with a cross by possessed Katherine. After that, she spends the rest of the movie in a hospital bed, blind and sidelined—symbolically on the nose to the point of self-parody. “Remember the original? Good. Now we shall literally blind its surviving lead.”
Linda Blair’s Regan appears briefly at the end in a sweet, emotional reunion with Chris that feels genuinely heartfelt—and also completely disconnected from the rest of the movie, like an epilogue from a better sequel accidentally attached to this one.
Interfaith Exorcism Voltron
One of the movie’s supposed innovations is the ecumenical exorcism: priests, a Baptist pastor, a Pentecostal, a rootwork healer, and others all joining forces to save the girls. On paper, it’s a cool idea: faith traditions uniting against evil.
In practice, it’s less “powerful spiritual coalition” and more “chaotic Zoom meeting with candles.”
The Catholic diocese refuses to sanction Father Maddox’s involvement (because bureaucracy), so he sneaks in anyway and is promptly killed by telekinetic neck snap, proving that the demon, at least, understands efficiency. The various religious figures each get a few moments to chant, pray, or shout, but the scene never gels into something truly intense or meaningful. It feels like a montage of “Religious Methods, Assorted.”
Dr. Beehibe, the rootwork healer, is by far the most interesting presence in the group, but the movie doesn’t give her enough time or weight. She could’ve been the spiritual backbone of a more daring film; here she’s just one more voice in a very stressed choir.
The Choice Twist: Demon Saw Saw Once
The big moral centerpiece of the climax is the demon’s “choose one to live” game. The parents are told: decide which girl lives, or the demon kills both. It’s clearly trying to echo Victor’s choice in Haiti and add another layer of torment.
Tony, Katherine’s father, breaks and yells that he chooses his daughter. Twist: the demon was lying. The one who gets chosen is actually the one doomed, so Katherine is dragged to Hell while Angela revives.
On a raw idea level, this is nasty and effective. On a story level, it plays as clunky emotional manipulation. Tony is reduced to “panicked dad who screws up cosmic trolley problem,” Miranda gets stuck in permanent grief, and Angela walks away with her father reborn in faith and her spiritual trauma only lightly toasted.
The movie wants to make a point about faith, sacrifice, and the impossibility of choice, but it feels like it borrowed its moral dilemma from a less subtle franchise and stapled it onto a script already struggling for coherence.
The Real Horror: Wasting This Much Potential
The most frightening thing about The Exorcist: Believer isn’t the demon, the possession, or the jump scares. It’s the sheer volume of squandered potential:
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A genuinely interesting premise with two possessed girls and interfaith response.
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A strong cast (Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Norbert Leo Butz, Alexander Siddig).
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The chance to explore faith, grief, and parenthood at a deeper level.
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The opportunity to build a new era for one of horror’s most revered franchises.
Instead, we got a movie that constantly reminds you of a much better film and then fails to justify its own existence. It’s not offensively terrible; it’s frustratingly mediocre—a cardinal sin when you’re standing in the shadow of a landmark.
The tone waffles between “grim spiritual horror” and “modern studio possession flick” without fully committing to either. The script keeps mistaking references for reverence. The scares are mostly surface-level. And the grand idea of a new trilogy drowned somewhere in a sea of lukewarm reactions.
Final Verdict: Less “Believer,” More “Please Stop Trying to Resurrect Classics”
If you watch The Exorcist: Believer on its own, with no history, it’s… fine. A mid-tier possession film with some emotion, some decent performances, and a handful of unsettling moments.
But as a sequel to The Exorcist? As a $400 million “new era”? It’s like building an altar and then using it to serve reheated leftovers.
The devil may be in the details, but here the details mostly say: “We had the brand name, we had the budget, we just didn’t have the soul.”
