Exorcist II: The Heretic

John Boorman approaches Exorcist II: The Heretic with a seriousness that would be welcome if the film could make its ideas clear. He wants horror to accommodate spiritual speculation and extravagant images, and there is something worth pursuing in that ambition. The result is poor: a confusing, ponderous film with occasional sights and sounds that suggest what might have been possible. Most critics have little patience with it, and the striking passages are not enough to persuade us they are wrong.

The screenplay is credited to William Goodhart and Rospo Pallenberg, and its central difficulty is making one idea follow another. The religious and metaphysical material is treated as important before it is made comprehensible, leaving us waiting for a clear reason to care. We were bored by the long stretches in which the images stay busy but the story barely seems to move. There is material here for a strange, searching horror film, but too little sense of what matters from one scene to the next.

Richard Burton plays Father Philip Lamont with a gravity that gives the film some human weight, though it also makes the confusion harder to forgive. Linda Blair, as Regan MacNeil, seems weighed down by the surrounding solemnity, while Louise Fletcher’s Dr. Gene Tuskin scarcely loosens the mood. These performances need a clearer dramatic purpose before their seriousness can mean much to us. Linda Blair’s tap-dancing sequence introduces a different kind of spectacle, but it does not make the surrounding film feel any less stiff.

William A. Fraker’s cinematography gives the African sequences a scale and strangeness that the talk cannot supply. The locust photography is particularly arresting: for once, the film has something concrete to hold our attention, and we felt a brief flicker of the unease we had been waiting for. Richard Macdonald’s production design makes the African settings feel remote from everyday life, which suits the film’s spiritual speculation. Yet the elaborate surroundings keep drawing attention away from characters who already struggle to interest us.

Editors Tom Priestley and John Merritt have an unenviable task in joining this material into a coherent progression. Their cutting does not establish a dependable rhythm, and the transitions leave too much work to the audience without making that work rewarding. We do not need every question answered, particularly in a film so willing to venture into the inexplicable. But when the immediate purpose of a scene is difficult to grasp, confusion keeps interrupting whatever tension has begun to form.

Ennio Morricone’s music is the strongest reason to stay. Its mixture of liturgical and African themes supplies an energy and sense of spiritual disturbance that the drama seldom earns for itself. The score helps the African passages feel like more than a diversion, suggesting connections that the writing cannot make convincing. It also makes the stiffness of the performances more noticeable, since the music achieves so much of the urgency they are straining to convey.

Within horror, there should be room for a sequel willing to risk this much oddness, and John Boorman deserves credit for attempting something beyond another exercise in familiar shocks. That goodwill wears thin across 118 minutes that so rarely frighten or involve us. Admirers of expressionistic horror may find enough in the locusts, the African imagery and Ennio Morricone’s music to justify their curiosity. For an evening built around being scared, we would choose something else.