The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

The Exorcist: Believer arrives as the sixth entry in a franchise that has spent five decades attempting to recapture a lightning strike, and it approaches the task with the enthusiasm of a contractor finishing a basement. David Gordon Green, fresh from his Halloween renovations, transplants the same legacy-sequel blueprint: a grieving parent, a possessed adolescent, and a returning icon wheeled out for roughly ten minutes of screen time. Leslie Odom Jr. plays Victor, a photographer who lost his wife in a Haitian earthquake and has carried the doubt like a heavy coat ever since. The film casts a Black lead and surrounds him with a varied ensemble, including a rootwork healer and a Baptist family, and it does so without comment. Identity is present. It is never argued.

The plot assembles an ecumenical exorcism, gathering a Catholic priest, a Baptist pastor, a Pentecostal preacher, and a rootwork practitioner into one room to shout at a demon. Religious critics have read this as a syncretist endorsement. Secular critics have read it as a mess. Both readings are defensible. The film gestures toward faith and community as sources of strength, though it never settles into a sermon; the messaging registers as texture, not instruction. Meanwhile, Ellen Burstyn returns as Chris MacNeil, is blinded by a cross for her trouble, and exits. The women here react, weep, or get maimed while the fathers do the deciding. No queer thread. No environmental lament. No body-acceptance arc, no neurodivergent framing, no reworking of the historical record. It is a possession movie. Demons, mostly.

The result topped the domestic box office for a single weekend before Taylor Swift arrived to end the conversation, and the planned trilogy was quietly dissolved. Green's film is competent, dimly lit, and forgettable, which is the worst thing a movie about the devil can be. There is nothing here to offend anyone except devotees of the 1973 original, who have already suffered worse. Classified and filed. A C grade from audiences feels generous, but audiences are forgiving people.