When horror is horrifyingly bad

A classic horror film’s sequel deeply disappoints priest Yaroslav Walker, missing opportunities to address psychological and spiritual power.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man and a women stand looking in the same direction with concerned faces.

Ellen Burstyn and Leslie Odom Jr are concerned about the reviews.

Universal Pictures.

That’s it. I have nothing more to say about the film in this review - The Exorcist: Believer. If you want a proper, knowledgeable, definitive derogatory diatribe against this dreadful waste of celluloid, may I suggest you watch this review by Mark Kermode. The good Doctor loves the original Exorcist more than any other reviewer I’m aware of and is the expert witness you need if you want to understand the absolute abomination this ‘film’ is (and, more importantly, is not!). I don’t have the energy. However, I do have the Church’s authority to speak on matters of faith and doctrine, so instead of my usual theology-smuggle at the end of a review, can we just dive right into it?

SPOILERS AHEAD – trust me, it doesn’t matter…

You can’t comment on an exorcism film without reference to the original – The Exorcist. Believer is David Gordon Green making a something of a sequel to the original; this went well with his first Halloween film, and then turned horrifyingly, stupidly bad with the second and third outings (and such treatment is promised for the Exorcist franchise). The Exorcist is a club sandwich of thematic wonder. William Peter Blatty was both a tremendously talented writer and also a thoughtful, intelligent, and committed Roman Catholic. When he wrote the novel of The Exorcist, he created a popular (slightly bloated) theological masterpiece. Adapting the script for William Friedkin to direct, he took the core themes and trimmed all the fat. The result is gorgeously lean, muscular, agile film that moves at a clip and doesn’t allow you a moment to forget the searing questions of faith, and doubt, and family, and failure, and sin.

Believer raises no such questions. If it has any sort of theme or message it seems to be this. The demonic is there not to sow random chaos, horror, pain and destruction (a good understanding of ‘evil’ as ‘nothing’, very much in keeping with a conception of evil formalised in Western theology by St Augustine almost a few millennia ago, which Blatty presents with perfection). It is there to offer people an ironic monkey’s-paw-esque bargain to reveal their own weakness and hypocrisy…yeh? Believer isn’t just terrible film, and not just a terrible sequel to a remarkable film; it is the lazy desecration of a cinematic theological legacy.

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’.

To name the overarching source of my incandescence, it is this question: What is the demonic doing in this film? What is it achieving? The original Exorcist is clear – Fr Merrin (the eponymous exorcist) explains that the possession of a child is intended as random, purely nihilistic, awful chaos that grinds down the resolve of righteous. It has no point, no substance – it is genuine ‘evil’, nothingness collapsing in on itself. In Believer the demon seems to be wanting to make a social commentary on parenting…maybe? At the start of the film the voodoo-blessed mother is caught in a building collapse after a Haitian earthquake, and as she lies dying in a makeshift hospital the father is presented with a terrible choice: the surgeon can only save one or the other, mother or baby. SPOILER – he may have a daughter, but he didn’t choose her. There’s another girl who is something of a free spirit with parents who are very light touch. One father didn’t want his daughter, the other doesn’t seem to be too bothered about his daughter having structure…you know? Parents, children, the sins of the father…you know?

The great climax has the demon(s) presenting the assembled non-exorcists with a choice. Fathers – choose your daughter and she’ll live, first come, first served. One father recognises the immorality, the pointless and annihilating ‘evil’, of letting a girl die, the other doesn’t. He’s been pretty much a non-entity throughout the film, has no real understanding of what is going on, is about as psychologically traumatised as it is possible to be, and is presented with the opportunity to save his daughter…of course he makes the wrong choice…because this is a ‘clever film’…The demon reveals the girl who was chosen will die. TWIST. Didn’t see that coming – admittedly this film is so stupid I didn’t see anything coming. Why? Why let one girl live? Why is this demon – this figure of total and destructive evil – teaching the people a lesson about self-sacrifice and never being willing to sacrifice an innocent? Is the demon making an important point? WHAT IS GOING ON!? Well, the mistakes of Heretic are being repeated, but this is a point for the cognoscenti…

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’; it ends with a broken man finding his faith and his redemption in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice (Fr Karras – the junior exorcist – takes the demon into himself and commits suicide). There is, in this final act, a moving and absolute statement on the indomitability of creation (and humanity as the pinnacle of creation) as that which God has willed into being and continues to will ‘to be’. We are here! We are loved! We are to be redeemed! We cannot be seduced by the lie that decay and dissolution and destruction and nothingness is our ultimate destiny. Believer has people stumbling by accident to a conclusion that says nothing about God, or the devil, or heaven, or hell, or faith, or doubt, or family, OR GOOD AND EVIL, or anything serious.

I despise this film. I pray to God the other two films in the proposed trilogy do not get made. They probably will…maybe that’s not the end of the world. Maybe the inevitable sequels will, in the very fact of their being filmed and released, be a better exposition of the reality of banal and destructive evil, which seeks to find the beauty of ‘what is’ and tarnish it, than their actual stories. Maybe…

Star rating? At the sight of this film the stars themselves hid…

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Freedom of Belief

Politics

17 July 2025

4 min read

Anna Politkovskaya took on the Kremlin and she paid the ultimate price

The Russian journalist who became a martyr for truth

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A journalist wearing a body armour and a helmet looks defiant

Maxine Peak plays Anna.

Rolling Pictures

While truth recedes as a global public good, a war on journalists is taking shape. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the highest number of journalists killed since collecting data thirty years ago. A large number of these were killed in Gaza, but there were deaths elsewhere: in Mexico, Syrian, Pakistan, Haiti, Myanmar. Many more than these at least 124 journalists were physically threatened and abused online; an unknown number have been imprisoned and abused by state authorities, shadowy militias or criminal gangs.

The illiberal tide is more powerful than the flow of liberal ideas today in the unregulated online market of opinion. A groundswell of distrust in so-called mainstream media has been effortlessly generated by sources with no obligations to impartiality and fewer professional standards round fact checking and evidence gathering. While every news source needs to be assessed for accuracy and fairness, the labelling of journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ by President Trump in his first term strayed into language used by the world’s despots. Territory occupied for many years by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The 2025 film Words of War tells the story of Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who rose to fame, and therefore to the attention of the Kremlin, through unvarnished despatches from the first Chechen war that uncovered terrible war crimes. Moscow learned its lesson for the second war in Chechnya by declaring the whole region off limits to reporters. For Politkovskaya, this provided an extra incentive to be there, returning to the country over forty times to document ever more awful crimes of disappearance, rape, and torture.

‘I witness very grave events and no-one else is reporting on them. I can’t not write about it’, Politkovskaya told the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford when they met. The meeting ended with some blunt Slavic advice: instead of interviewing a journalist about the war in Chechnya, the interviewer should be going there herself.

Words of War has an unreal quality to it. The actors are English, but the scenes are entirely Russian. It is a reminder of Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy The Death of Stalin and even shares an actor in Jason Isaacs, who swaps General Zhukov’s blunt Yorkshire accent for the more cultured tones of Politkovskaya’s anxious husband, Sasha.

Politkovskaya was a force of nature, and a devout Christian. She knew the kind of people she was messing with and what they were capable of, but she carried on the same, driven by an implacable will to truth. On flying to cover the appalling school siege at Beslan in 2004 – a scene the film begins with - she became violently ill, almost certainly a targeted poisoning like Alexei Navalny suffered on a plane over Siberia.

I get intimidating calls, people hovering in my hallway, she observed. There’ve been so many threats, there was a time when my editors decided my life really was in danger. But I’m used to it. If the FSB is so opposed to me, it only proves that what I’m doing is effective.

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead as she entered her block of flats with a handful of groceries. It was Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Five men were eventually found guilty of organising and carrying out the murder, but the person who ordered the killing was never found out. Speculation round how high the order came from is, in a way, superfluous: this is the nature of Russia’s state in the twenty first century.

Elena Kostyuchenko is a millennial writer who features in the film as a young Novaya Gazeta intern and was inspired by her contact with Politkovskaya, ensuring a legacy in a younger generation:

She was the first person I saw when I came to the Novaya Gazeta editorial offices. Tall, radiant, with silver-white hair, flying down the hall. I didn’t recognise her. I was just struck by her beauty.

Stalin’s alleged mantra: no person, no problem, remains barely deniable Kremlin policy. The late politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are simply the highest profile of a large cohort of individuals barely known in the west who have opposed Putin with stunning levels of bravery. Caricaturing Russians as corrupt, rapacious and violent – as well as being a lazy trope - is to abuse the names of an untold number who retain their dignity, integrity and agency.

New histories are written in nations where regimes fall, but whether they tell a truthful story about the past depends on the environment the new authorities allow. The human rights group Memorial began this work in the early post-Soviet era, only to be shut down by Putin’s police officers. Words of War should have been made in Russia by Russians. One day maybe it will be, and Anna Politkovskaya will be seen across Russia for what she is: a martyr for truth. And not an enemy of the people.

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