“Their heads spun 360 degrees. They vomited up green sludge. They violently shouted curse words…No, not the demonically possessed girls in ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ — the awful movie’s furious audience.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Posthttps://t.co/41epWJpA04 pic.twitter.com/xtpK3ap51j
— metacritic (@metacritic) October 4, 2023
Screenings for The Exorcist: Believer begin tonight. The reviews are as brutal as you imagine. Universal spent $400 million on the rights to the franchise and decided making an entire trilogy was a good idea. They might be regretting that now.
Here’s some of what critics are saying:
IndieWire: By the time “The Exorcist: Believer” arrives at its fittingly half-assed whimper of a final scene, it’s become almost impossible to make the case that having bad faith is better than simply abandoning it altogether.
Variety: How shocking and scary, how awesome in its ickiness, how horrifying can a movie really be when its entire purpose is to deliver, on cue, every trope that decades of demonic-possession movies have geared us to expect? [Bonus: David Gordon Green is referred to here as a “once-interesting filmmaker.”]
The Hollywood Reporter: Unlike Green’s Halloween trilogy, which served up diminishing returns with each new installment, Believer condenses that downward trajectory into the first chapter.
The Washington Post: If “The Exorcist: Believer” is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.
The film currently has a 41 on Metacritic and a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes.
