UNBELIEVABLE

Opening in theaters this week:

The Exorcist: Believer--Two 13-year-old girls go missing one day after school. Their panicked parents, single Dad Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and evangelical couple Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) frantically search their Georgia suburb, but three days later the girls turn up alive.

These early scenes of this sixth Exorcist follow-up are tense and gripping, convincingly dramatizing a dread familiar to parents, but also deploying a few well-executed cheap scares. Soon after the girls reappear, they start showing unmistakable signs of demonic possession. The nonbelieving Victor is skeptical at first, but before long he has enlisted the aid of Chris McNeil (the radiant Ellen Burstyn), who went through a similar experience with her daughter Regan up in Georgetown half a century earlier.

Act Two of Believer is mostly devoted to a rather ecumenical exorcism, with Catholics, Evangelicals and what appear to be Voodoo practitioners all participating, among others. This section falls flat. We get all the obligatory stuff--levitation, projectile tummy trouble--but none of the elliptical yet grueling intensity that the late William Friedkin brought to the 1973 film. Put simply, the second half of the movie just isn't very scary.

Part of what made the first film so potent was its harsh, judgy small-c conservative Catholicism. It seemed to suggest that Chris McNeil's worldly career and single life left the door open for the devil to take her daughter. The new film almost gets this right; it implies that Victor's daughter's yearning to communicate with her dead mom gives the demon a foothold, as Regan playing with a Ouija board invited in "Captain Howdy" back in the original.

But the kum-ba-yah sensibility of Believer's interfaith exorcism weakens this blood-and-thunder atmosphere. Don't misunderstand; I agree, on the whole, with the sentiments expressed in this movie's mild little homilies about faith and community and hope. But I don't think they're the most effective way to scare an audience. Decades ago I had a girlfriend, a lapsed Catholic, who found the original Exorcist so terrifying that she could barely stand to have it mentioned (I used to tease her by imitating the demon's voice).

The new film lacks the ruthlessness that could create that sort of reaction. Nor did I really find it plausible that these staunch traditionalist faiths could practice this archaic rite in harmony. As soon as anything went wrong, wouldn't they start blaming each other?

The director, David Gordon Green, works from a script that he wrote with several hands including Danny McBride. They were the team behind 2021's Halloween Kills, another honorable but unsuccessful revival of a classic horror franchise. The cast here is capable, with one standout--that splendid, always reliable warhorse Ann Dowd as a nurse with a relevant past who befriends Victor.

This much more, if little else, can be said for Believer: although the insolently absurd yet imaginative spectacle of John Boorman's 1977 Exorcist 2: The Heretic has its fascinations, Believer can probably still claim to be the best of the Exorcist sequels. But that's a low bar.

JUST SAY JOE

What happens when the hit man you hire to murder your mother falls in love with your younger sister? That’s the major dramatic question of William Friedkin’s new film Killer Joe, opening in the Valley this weekend at Harkins Camelview. The answer isn’t pretty.

Chris (Emile Hirsch), a small-potatoes Texas drug dealer, lives with his mother. His slow-thinking father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) lives in a trailer park with his slatternly waitress wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) and Chris’ angelically pretty, otherworldly younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple). As the story begins, Chris, dangerously overdue to a loan shark, gets Ansel to agree to arranging the death of Chris and Dottie’s mother, to collect a life insurance policy. The idea is that, with Dottie as beneficiary, Ansel, Sharla, Chris and Dottie will be able to split it four ways—once they’ve paid the killer.

Said killer is Joe Cooper, a cop who commits the occasional homicide as a side business. Joe (Matthew McConaughey) almost calls off the deal when he learns that his prospective clients don’t have the money up front, but he’s gotten a good look at, and had a nice chat with, young Dottie, and he agrees to take the job if Ansel and Chris agree to “give” him Dottie “as a retainer.” Ansel and Chris agree to this outrage, and from there things all go downhill, with noir-style twists and turns culminating in a grueling—if also somewhat campy—scene of Grand Guignol humiliation that may change your relationship with fried chicken forever.

Killer Joe is based on an early play by Tracey Letts, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner for August: Osage County, and while Friedkin gooses the action around to different locations with some good jagged transitions, the basic theatricality of the material is unmistakable. There’s really nothing essential in this dialogue-driven piece that couldn’t have been managed well enough on one set, and seeing it performed live would have had an even more shocking impact.

It’s plenty shocking on film, though. Rated NC-17, Killer Joe isn’t for everybody. It’s an excellent showcase of ensemble acting, however, from Church’s hilariously pre-defeated line readings to Gershon’s lewd smirks to Temple’s sweet, guileless amorality. Hirsch’s role is tough; constantly in terror and/or rage and haunted by both pure and Freudian devotion to Dottie, he gets less of a chance to play for laughs than the others, but he’s still effective.

The star role, unquestionably, is McConaughey’s terrifying yet compelling Joe. Soft-spoken and polite, even gallant, with a clear, observant stare, Joe’s a lethal psychopath and a helpless fetishist, yet something about his formal manner makes him seem less chaotic and ruinous than Chris and Ansel, and it’s clear enough why Dottie’s disassociative innocence would appeal to him.

The attitude that Killer Joe dramatizes is one of the basic positions of noir: that Women Are Trouble. While the film doesn’t try to debunk this view, it also suggests that men are so stupid, crooked, brutal and perverted that they deserve that trouble.