| Universal Pictures | Release Date: October 6, 2023 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
7
Mixed:
33
Negative:
14
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Critic Reviews
Oct 4, 2023
Does a decent job living up to a legendary predecessor. Original star Ellen Burstyn returns in the latest film, which also goes all in exploring every parent’s deepest fears, but while it tries admirably, “Believer” is nowhere near as profoundly scary as William Friedkin’s genre-defining chiller.
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The GuardianOct 4, 2023
Like with his Halloween reinvention, the film is trapped between the serious and the silly, a thinly etched tale of a father dealing with grief and faith jarring next to scenes of a demonic child screaming the C-word while spitting slime. It’s better when it leans into the latter, a schlocky night out at the movies made with more competence than most recent horrors but one that is unlikely to make a believer out of die-hard fans.
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Oct 4, 2023
Though its predestined, blockbuster exorcism sequence just manages to provide a satisfying conclusion to the story, the underdeveloped synchronized possession element creates more problems than it solves and adds bloat to a movie which would have benefitted from a leaner, more measured approach.
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Oct 16, 2023
As a film, it’s at best serviceable, stronger in its world-building than in its climactic exorcism and nowhere near as unnerving as the original. Yet Believer is a fascinating artifact of 2023. It highlights in myriad ways how much the world has changed since the original’s release. Hollywood isn’t the same, and neither is American religious culture.
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Oct 5, 2023
There are many reasons why The Exorcist worked and still does, and why The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t and never will. But to explore the difference between the films too profoundly would be to legitimize Green’s film as a worthy successor to William Friedkin’s masterpiece. It isn’t.
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Oct 4, 2023
Believer is a film wherein everyone’s effort — effort to underline a message, effort to deliver a nuanced performance, effort to be visually interesting, effort to shock the audience — is all a little too visible on screen. Intellectually, I can get behind almost all of it, but on a gut level, the level where horror lives and breathes, it does very little for me.
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The PlaylistOct 4, 2023
Make no mistake, most audiences will find ‘Believer’ revolting, but that’s also the point. It’s fascinating in the way it swings for the fences, is full of conviction, and is overflowing with stimulating ideas about acceptance, denial, community, and more, many of them engaging, many of them handled with no sense of taste (to which Green would probably argue is what Friedkin’s film did; good taste be cast out!).
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ColliderOct 4, 2023
For all the promising threads it pulls on surrounding a variety of faith traditions, The Exorcist: Believer doesn't earn your belief or your fear. Where Friedkin's classic will endure forever, this superficial sequel remains stuck in the past. It may try to speak all the same verses, but it doesn't add new life to any of them.
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Oct 6, 2023
As for Green’s Exorcist: Believer, which starts out strong—evoking all the reasons demons in search of a body to possess can’t resist the hormonal lightning rod of adolescent girls—and ends in a dumb jumble of generic-looking zombie-girl Blumhouse special effects: I’ve already forgotten it.
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Oct 4, 2023
Oct 4, 2023
Measured against the often mediocre standards of today’s glut of reboots and reimaginings, “Believer” is slickly professional, its young performers more than up to the task. It’s also disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, cautious, gesturing only wanly toward the original’s potent weave of puberty, religion and corporeal abuse.
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Oct 4, 2023
Even though the latest horror-franchise resurrection from intellectual-property gravedigger David Gordon Green (Halloween) isn’t sullying a spotless brand, The Exorcist: Believer still reeks of sulfur-scented soullessness. The moviegoing body may be willing, but the cinematic flesh is weak.
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The IndependentOct 4, 2023
Oct 5, 2023
Nearly 50 years after William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” elevated the horror genre to Oscar-level greatness and produced chills and thrills that resonate with us to this day, the direct sequel The Exorcist: Believer is a tasteless, tacky, uninspired and just plain lousy knockoff that upchucks pea soup-colored porridge all over the legacy of the original, from the crummy-looking and tedious exorcism sequence to the murky cinematography, to the return of an iconic character who is given an absolutely awful and borderline offensive storyline.
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Movie NationOct 4, 2023
Aafter taking forever to open up the story (some good on location footage in Haiti) and stumbling a bit in setting the “growing sense of doom” tone, Green loses the plot and with it the power to land a big third act punch. Finishing with a swing and a miss can’t have been his intent.
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Oct 6, 2023
The Exorcist: Believer brushes up against an interesting notion—this time, the Catholic Church refuses to approve an official exorcism, citing concerns over the safety of the procedure. But the end result is not much different; it’s still a bunch of adults standing in a room yelling prayers and exhortations at possessed girls.
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Oct 4, 2023
Theologically muddled, narratively simplistic, and somehow pulling off a bigger waste of a legacy character than the near-blasphemous return of Sally Hardesty for 2022's ill-fated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer proves that double the possessions does not mean double the fun.
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IndieWireOct 4, 2023
An execrable film that’s redeemed by almost nothing besides Leslie Odom Jr.’s well-modulated lead performance and the ambient sense of unease that Green casts over the story’s first half, “Believer” is so creatively spineless and bereft of its own ideas that its entire concept of sacrilege is limited to imperiling its franchise’s legacy.
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