111 min | R | October 6, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Two girls vanish in the woods and return three days later wrong. A single father drags a houseful of strangers and one familiar face into the work of casting it out. The premise borrows the bones of a masterpiece and finds nothing to put inside them.
Two teenage girls walk into the woods and come back three days later with no memory and something else riding along. Victor Fielding raised his daughter alone since losing his wife. Now Angela talks in a voice that is not hers and the wounds on her body write themselves. The film wants to be about grief and faith and the way a community of believers from different traditions might join hands against the dark. What it is actually about is a studio strip-mining a fifty-year-old title for a name it can put on three posters.
Leslie Odom Jr. plays Victor as a man who decided long ago that he does not believe in anything. Odom commits to the skepticism and the panic, and the early scenes of a father watching his child turn feral carry real dread. Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill play the possessed girls through hours of prosthetics and contact lenses, and they snarl and contort with full conviction. Ann Dowd plays Nurse Ann Brooks, the neighbor who carries her own buried wound into the exorcism, and Dowd gives the film its only character with an interior life. Ellen Burstyn returns as Chris MacNeil and gets a scene that exists to remind you of a better movie. The performers are not the problem. The script gives them rituals to perform and no people to become.
David Gordon Green directs from a screenplay he wrote with Peter Sattler, and the seams of the assembly show in every choice. The possession makeup is grotesque and the contortion work is convincing, but Green cuts away from the body horror at the exact moments it should hold. Michael Simmonds shoots the woods and the suburban interiors in a flat, desaturated gray that drains the images of menace. The sound design leans on low rumbles and sudden stings instead of building tension across a scene. Green stages the climactic exorcism as a multi-faith group ceremony, a genuinely fresh idea, and then films it as a montage of cross-cutting that refuses to let any single moment land.
The original film understood that horror lives in the unbearable wait between the knocks. This one mistakes movement for momentum and noise for fear. It assembles the iconography of possession, the bed, the bindings, the prayers, the heads that turn the wrong way, and arranges them like a tribute act covering songs it does not understand. The interesting movie buried here is about whether faith can be collective, whether strangers can save a child none of them share. Green raises that question in the last twenty minutes and then drowns it in spectacle, leaving a sequel that honors a classic by proving how little of it can be inherited.