Exorcist: The Beginning (2004)

Exorcist: The Beginning arrives with the weariness of a production that has already endured several exorcisms of its own. Renny Harlin was brought in after the studio buried Paul Schrader's version, and the resulting film, released in 2004, places Stellan Skarsgard's Father Merrin in British Kenya in 1949, where a Byzantine church has been excavated from the sand in a region Christianity never reached. There are boils, maggots, hyenas, and a stillborn infant. The film's ambitions are entirely visceral, and it achieves them with a bluntness that leaves little room for anything else.

The Kenyan setting does supply Black African characters: the translator Chuma, the chief Sebituana, assorted tribesmen. They function as backdrop. The excavation is a British colonial enterprise, and the finale has soldiers and locals slaughtering each other over blame for the supernatural events, which brushes against colonial friction without ever examining it. A female doctor, Sarah Novak, holds professional standing until the film reveals her as the possessed antagonist, which is not the sort of promotion that advances a cause. The antiquities collector who sets the plot in motion is a device for delivering exposition, not a target of economic critique.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no environmental concern, no celebration of bodies that are not covered in gore, and no attempt to frame madness as anything but demonic. The Byzantine and World War II passages exist to explain a curse, not to revise history. The film never lectures. It simply wants to frighten, and on that modest errand it is competent, joyless, and forgotten.