At no point in the new film The Exorcist: Believer—a direct legacy-quel to William Friedkin’s 50-year-old horror landmark The Exorcist that ignores all prior follow-ups—does anyone break into song. 

One could be forgiven for expecting a few toe-tappers just based on Believer’s cast: There’s Leslie Odom Jr., Broadway’s original Aaron Burr, playing the overprotective single father of a 13-year-old who comes down with a dire case of demonic possession. There are country singer Jennifer Nettles and two-time Tony Award winner Norbert Leo Butz as the mother and father of another girl with the same damn problem. All three are committed and convincing as parents wrestling with the unthinkable. 

Ann Dowd, another stage veteran who’s been so chilling in Hereditary and The Handmaid’s Tale, is reliably compelling, too, as a kindly neighbor who appeals to an agnostic Odom to consider that there might a supernatural explanation for his daughter’s moaning, levitating, black bile-vomiting distemper. 

Then there’s the performance that represents Believer’s one and only reason to exist: The return of 90-year-old Ellen Burstyn to the franchise as Chris MacNeil, the woman who sought to have her daughter exorcised back in 1973. Burstyn earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance in the original film, then wisely sat out the previous sequels. She’s only in Believer for a handful of scenes, but they’re the best ones in the movie. MacNeil wrote a nonfiction bestseller about her triumph over the devil, we learn, though she’s come to regret the book project. Odom’s character seeks MacNeil out for her expertise in de-Satanizing truculent children, and the two of them evince genuine chemistry.

As the two tweens who wander into the woods after school and are found miles away three days later with alarming physical and psychic injuries but no memory of what befell them, young actors Lydia Jewett and Olivia O’Neill are strong, too. But so what? Solid acting does not a movie make. The ensemble keeps us anchored in the narrative emotionally despite the familiarity and general thinness of Believer’s screenplay (by Peter Sattler and director David Gordon Green, from a story by Green, Scott Teems, and Danny McBride), but the movie still conspicuously lacks a raison, or even a reason. There’s an idea embedded in the script about the impossibility of choosing among the people we love, and an attempt at contemporary resonance in a prologue set during the earthquake that leveled much of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2010. These enhancements are unconvincing. The Exorcist is one of the most unsettling films ever made. Believer is a movie of the week you won’t even remember the next morning.

It’s curious that Green, who began his career making sensitive low-budget dramas like George Washington and Snow Angels, has pivoted so hard into the Blumhouse horror revival market, co-writing and directing three Halloween follow-ups circa 2018-2022 before addressing an even more indelible 1970s chiller in The Exorcist. But his enthusiasm for this genre is not the same thing as an affinity for it. His earlier films were distinct and closely observed and personal, and the best thing you can say about Believer is that it’s a competently executed mid-tier entry in a genre Green clearly loves. That’s only a tragedy in the sense that Green has shown us he’s an honest-to-God auteur with something to say. But he isn’t saying much of anything here.

The Exorcist: Believer is now playing at area theaters.