The Exorcist: Believer is weighed down by the legend of William Friedkin’s original

Universal Studios, along with the streaming service Peacock, paid $400 million for the rights to The Exorcist franchise. There have been five films and one TV series so far, and this new film is the first of a projected reboot trilogy. The producer is the ubiquitous horror supremo Jason Blum, and the co-writer and director David Gordon Green helped to reboot the Halloween series in 2018. Fifty years after the original film caused a genuine sensation, and in the months after the death of the original director original William Friedkin, the stars looked nicely aligned.

It hasn’t worked. The Exorcist: Believer is weighed down by the legend of Friedkin’s first film. It gets nowhere near the authentic holy dread of that first possession, spurred by Friedkin’s conflicted Catholic response to William Peter Blatty’s book of the original case. Cameos for Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair – Burstyn is criminally underused – only help to underscore the distance between the films.

In this plot, it is two teenage children who go missing after messing around with contacting the dead in the suburban woods in Percy, Georgia. They are missing for three days before being recovered, only to have been possessed by another busy ancient Mesopotamian demon. There’s an echo of the structure of the original opening scenes set in Haiti, the seed of the possession of Angela (Lidya Jewett), but the pacing is off, and this film accelerates to its climactic moments without any slow creep of menace. A rag-tag group of parents and assorted believers come together for the exorcism, but there are few shocks and horrors to match the authentic transgression that was felt by audiences in 1973.

The Exorcist: Believer is interesting only in its shift to a multi-faith approach to demonic possession. The Catholic authorities come off particularly badly in this film, as is perhaps right given their historic dealings with the spiritual welfare of young teenagers. Instead, we have a rootwork healer, who draws out diagrams from the Kongo religion, which fed into the syncretic Voodoo beliefs of enslaved people in Haiti and the American south. The white parents of the other girl are fervent Baptists. There’s also a Pentecostal preacher in the mix.

A nurse (played by the stalwart Ann Dowd) proves to be a former Catholic convent girl with a dark secret that has tested her faith. Angela’s dad flips from scepticism to belief in the blink of an eye. It seems highly unlikely these rival systems of belief would come together to create a meaningful rite of exorcism, but this is exactly what the film hopes to pull off. Perhaps they are really all praying for us to believe in the franchise reboot rather than the holy terrors of ritual.

 ► The Exorcist: Believer is in UK cinemas now.