The Exorcist: Believer abandons the core idea that makes the series great

polygon.com:

There are exorcism movies and Exorcist movies, and the two have never really been the same thing.

While movies about possession were around long before William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic, few felt so grand or captured the public imagination in the same way as The Exorcist and its direct followers. Exorcist movies have always been more ambitious than their exorcism cousins, taking on thematic topics far bigger than the demonic activity at the center of their plot. They’ve been about loss of faith, technology versus the supernatural, collective fear and societal decline, and even the evils of colonialism. But The Exorcist: Believer, David Gordon Green’s 2023 Exorcist movie, takes the series in the opposite direction, tightening its focus to possession only. In the process of stripping the series down to essentials, Green and co-writer Peter Sattler have made the most boring, uninspired version of The Exorcist imaginable: a regular old exorcism movie.

Unlike its previous Exorcist series counterparts, Believer doesn’t center on an exorcist at all. Instead, the movie mostly follows Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.), the single father of Angela (Lidya Jewett), who gets possessed along with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum). The two girls start the movie by lying to their respective parents about their evening plans, then venturing off into the woods to an abandoned house to perform a makeshift seance so Angela can talk to her dead mother. The seance goes horribly wrong, we’re told, but not really shown. The girls pop up three days later, covered with cuts and acting strangely — one girl turning lights on and off, the other shouting in the middle of church.

That’s more or less the last time the