When you watch a lot of scary movies, the good ones always stand out because there are so many bad ones. It’s incredibly easy to make a bad horror movie. It’s always a gamble whether the logic and the psyche of the movie will come across to provoke scares, or whether they’ll flop and just come off as stupid. Horror sequels double down on that gamble, since you’re often trying to recycle plot points from originals and hoping that it’ll still be scary. Predictably, The Exorcist: Believer does not accomplish what the original does, and frankly, it’s not a very good movie.

The Exorcist: Believer focuses on a single father, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), and his tween daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett). The two of them have a strong bond but have never really fully recovered from the loss of his wife and her mother. Attempting to reach out to her beyond the grave, Angela joins up with a religious friend of hers, Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), to create a seance. When the girls don’t return home after school, a search party looks for them for days, only for them to turn up in a random barn a mile from where they went missing. Without any memory of where they’ve been, the girls try to readjust to their normal lives but their personalities start to change, and it soon becomes clear that the girls are not themselves. Enlisting the help of Chris MacNeil (the incredible Ellen Burstyn) and several other religious folks from all over the map, Victor joins up with Katherine’s parents to try and give the girls an exorcism.

Siiiiiiiiigggggghhhhhhh. Okay. While I understand the attempt that the plot tries to take at nondenominational exorcismry, this tactic does not come off as effective to me. Victor is clearly the hero of the story, taking an open-minded approach to the girls’ mysterious possession and recruiting the help of several religious and nonreligious authorities on exorcism. Katherine’s parents are painted as being narrow-minded Southern Christians who at one point cower in fear from Katherine and basically give up helping her. I really liked the attempt to introduce new perspectives on possession, from a ritualistic healer to a would-be nun to Evangelical Christians. However, since this approach seems to disseminate fractions of power without offering one truth, it feels like none of the religions hold true power over the demons, which goes against the whole concept of the original. Arguably, the father’s love is what saves one girl in the end, while the other’s misguided faith ends up condemning the other (which I still have beef with, because if we’re calling all religions equal, it’s confusing that she ends up in hell; just like have some continuity here).

I guess my biggest qualm with the whole movie is that it’s muddy. The original Exorcist story offers a perspective on Good vs. Evil and Fact vs. Faith. While The Exorcist takes liberties with super-Catholic William Peter Blatty’s original novel, it keeps its essence. It’s scary because it’s unclear at first whether the young girl is possessed or suffering from some sort of organic brain decay; and by the end it becomes a question of whether faith can rally itself when faced with pure evil. This version seems to bypass that idea by trying to ask which religions are legitimate or not; a question that doesn’t come off cleanly and which doesn’t really get answered. It also makes the fight against the demons kind of a nonstarter, as the parents just try to fling whatever shit will stick. By sidestepping faith, the story loses its force, and the ending becomes arbitrary.

All in all, I wasn’t expecting much from this movie, and I didn’t get much. 4 outa 10.