THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

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Another in this year's list of horror sequels that we really didn't need and aren't much good: after Saw X, Scream VI and whatever number the new Evil Dead was, here's an even more inexplicable exhumation of a scenario that absolutely should have been left alone. David Gordon Green's track record with his recent trilogy of Halloween sequels did not inspire confidence, and those low expectations have been barely scraped by this baffling revival of The Exorcist, which pretty much no-one has been crying out for since the last theatrical attempt back in 2005. The notorious Exorcist II: The Heretic is generally reckoned a disaster even though they were trying, possibly unsuccessfully, to do something different with the ideas and characters rather than merely rehashing the previous one; The Exorcist III was wonderfully dark and atmospheric with one perfect and unforgettable jump scare, while of the two parallel fourth instalments Renny Harlin's Beginning was the more multiplex scary and Paul Schrader's Dominion was the more arthouse unsettling. (I haven't seen the stage show or the TV series and I'm not going to.)

The Exorcist: Believer seems to be going out of its way to not be an Exorcist movie to the extent that for the first half hour or more I wasn't sure if the cinema had put the right film on. Two young girls, one of whom comes from a hard Christian family and the other lost her mother in childbirth after a Haitian earthquake, disappear for three days but when they return there's something badly wrong with both of them. Are they possessed? Eventually - eventually! - they call in Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) who has experience of this sort of thing...

Aside from several uses of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Chris MacNeil is really the only connection to The Exorcist and if they hadn't dragged her into it this could, and would, have been a regular standalone teen possession movie that would have passed largely unnoticed in the runup to Halloween. Making it part of the Exorcist legacy puts a burden on it that it simply cannot support, even if you're not a massive fan of the original film (and I'm not). Granted, the film accelerates mightily when it finally gets down to some actual exorcising, with an extended all-stops-out bonkers confrontation with much shouting and silly visual effects, but with almost no impact. There are a couple of nice, spooky little something-in-the-background moments early on that do raise a brief frisson, but that's all. And the very last shot, which feels like an end-of-season twist cliffhanger (presumably setting up Deceiver for 2025), just falls stone dead.

The sensible thing to do would be to just abandon the rest of the planned series and just walk away and let it rest now. The Exorcist was never really franchise material anyway; it wasn't something that warranted expansion into a Cinematic Universe. It was a one-off half a century ago that shattered the boundaries of acceptability and shock, and this latest one, which has a 15 certificate, doesn't get anywhere near those boundaries, let alone push at any new ones. The Exorcist: Believer is entirely unnecessary, entirely redundant and entirely not frightening, scary or shocking. This might not be the worst teen possession movie ever made, but it is easily the worst and least interesting Exorcist movie ever made.

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