The devil, as they say, is in the details, or in the case of David Gordon Green's "Exorcist" extension, the lack thereof: The film's reasonably creepy first act laboriously sets up what might have been something good and jarring, only for the script to become a mishmash of barely considered ideas that mostly end up as demonic-hued piffle.
We first meet Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) as he is forced to make a terrible choice in Haiti, preserving the life of his beloved wife, injured in a fall during an earthquake, or his unborn daughter. We then travel 13 years later, after Victor, now a single parent with his teenage daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), has settled down in a small town in Georgia where he works as a family photographer.
When Angela suddenly disappears with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum), after the pair go walking off into the woods, Victor joins up with Katherine's parents (Jennifer Nettles and Danny McCarthy) until the kids are seemingly safely returned to them three days later. Only, upon their return, it appears the girls have changed, speaking in odd, dissonant voices, their teeth rotting along their gum lines, their hair in desperate need of a wash, while holding contempt for everyone they see (a not inapt metaphor for teenagers in general, actually).
Driven to desperation, Victor eventually goes to meet with Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the beleaguered actress mother featured in the first film, now having written a bestseller about her daughter's ordeal. The two put together a mix-and-match spiritual team (a pastor, a rootwork folk doctor, a few devout believers, and, eventually a Catholic priest, going against the wishes of his clergy leaders) in order to free the girls of their unholy torment.
The original 1973 film, directed by the late, great William Friedkin, like most truly unsettling horror movies, caused a veritable cultural uproar, attended by many (possibly apocryphal) stories of audience members passing out, or fleeing the theater in tears and terror. That film relied on subverting social mores -- turning a young girl into an emissary of evil, replete with a sailor's vernacular, an iron-lung wheeze, and a pea soup fire hose digestive system -- along with some sophisticated body-horror (the spider-crawl down the stairs remains one of the more enduringly unnerving cinematic images of the 20th century), to create a nightmare tableau that somehow captured the zeitgeist of everyone's fears: Parents, that their children would be lost to them forever and in eternal torment; children, that their parents would leave them alone upstairs with a demon devouring their soul.
Gordon Green, who recently worked through a similarly re-imagined "Halloween" series, is not without skill, and care -- many of the scenes are constructed in effective shorthand, some of the early moments between Victor and his daughter have actual gravity to them, and the film draws some genuine creepiness out of its two young female leads -- but the script, credited to Gordon Green, Peter Sattler and Scott Teems, loses steam as the girls descend farther into their hellish state, and the climax feels cobbled together, and morally incoherent. Whereas the first film spoke to the nature (and price) of evil, this film is content to play at the fringes of an idea without committing to anything in particular. Even the more inclusive lineup of religious figures assembled to battle the dark lord feels like the setup to a punchline that never comes (a pastor, a priest, and a folk doctor walk into a bar...).
You get the impression Gordon Green cherishes these classic horror films of yore -- he at least approaches the material with suitable reverence -- but try as he might, he can't recapture the incredibly effective (and increasingly rare) experience of witnessing previously unimagined horrors as they suddenly come scuttling down the stairs at you.
82 Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jennifer Nettles, Olivia Marcum, Lidya Jewett, Ann Dowd, Raphael Sbarge, E.J. Bonilla, Antoni Corone
Director: David Gordon Green
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute
Playing theatrically