The Believers (1987)

Following the tragic death of his wife, police psychiatrist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) moves to New York with his little son Chris (Harley Cross), for a classical new start. Things don’t begin too badly, despite the lingering grief. Cal even begins to get close to a woman again, his landlady Jessica (Helen Shaver). Not that Chris approves, obviously.

However, when Cal is called in to use his professional expertise on Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smits), a cop who seems to have lost it completely while doing some sort of undercover work nobody really seems to know about, he’s sucked into an occult conspiracy. Lopez believes that a sort-of santeria cult has infiltrated the highest echelons of New York society, using very dark magic for power and influence; his “madness” is no such thing, but actually a curse bestowed on him by the cult to keep him quiet.

At first, Cal believes his patient’s ideas to be delusions, but various hints and coincidences suggest to him there’s more than just a little truth to the man’s tales. Obviously, stumbling onto this sort of conspiracy will put Cal and everyone he loves in danger. And that’s before he learns his family (well, at least the one he married into) is much closer connected to the cult than he ever would have believed.

That last part really is the weakest aspect of John Schlesinger’s occult conspiracy horror movie The Believers, because at the point in the story the family business becomes important, Cal is already as connected to what’s going on around him as the narrative could ever need. Adding backstory connections this late in the movie is really just ladling on twists instead of adding actual narrative tension.

Given how much else the movie does right, I don’t believe the somewhat overcooked feel of its third act is as much of a problem as it could be. After all, once we reach that point of ultimate paranoia, the film has already left the realm of probability far behind and has turned into a perfect mix of urban paranoia, dramatic emotional breakdowns and rather nasty witchcraft.

Sheen copes with all of these elements well, grounding the roles of increasingly obsessed investigator, still grieving father and husband, mental health professional, and ranting maniac in the same kind of intensity so effectively, there’s rarely the feeling of incompatible elements trying too hard to exist in the same character.

Some of the horror and suspense scenes are astonishingly nasty for a rather mainstream production like this, even for a film made in the sometimes less rigid 80s. Schlesinger packages this nastiness into very traditionally grounded forms of suspense and horror, in form and style giving an occult drift to the 70s conspiracy thriller (a genre the director of Marathon Man certainly knows quite a bit about) while keeping that genre’s distrust of authority and the rich and powerful. In fact, The Believers takes this distrust even one step further by making belief/faith itself a thing to be distrusted – or at least belief as embodied in people perfectly willing to sacrifice their own children for these beliefs.

The film’s racial politics, unlike its class ones, will probably be rather problematic for some today. The Believers’ treatment and interpretation of brujeria is certainly not great. The filmmakers clearly realize this, so the film spends some time to acquaint us with morally upright followers of the religion; it never makes any kind of argument there, however, and certainly doesn’t help its case by at least leaving the reading open that its evil rich people were all seduced by the powers of the only black character of note in the film. Which is its own can of worms.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this one way or the other, and found myself rather too involved in the film’s increasingly over the top – that’s a good thing – narrative of paranoia and horrible shit happening to perfectly okay people to be invested in putting the least favourable reading on everything I saw.

Hell, I was riveted enough, I even enjoyed the horror movie bullshit ending for once. Perhaps because it’s not actually bullshit this time around, and instead fits the tone and themes of what comes before so perfectly. Again, at that point The Believers has left the realm of the plausible and the probable so far, yet so elegantly, behind, I would have probably bought whatever Schlesinger was trying to sell.

Three Films Make A Post: In this town a speeding ticket is a death sentence

Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City aka El silencio de la ciudad blanca (2019): This Netflix movie adaptation of a crime novel that’s apparently much better (which shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve) directed by Daniel Calparsoro feels like a greatest hits version of the serial killer thriller genre, and as with most greatest hits collections, there’s a lot of glitz but little substance on screen. Sure, the film does look great, but the script is a complete mess full of sub-plots that are picked up, dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason, motivations and character psychology that make little sense (and is usually neither explained nor demonstrated but just stated awkwardly). The film has the kind of overloaded stop and start pacing you often get when a book is cut down to what a screenwriter deems to be its highlights.
Otherwise, there’s only the usual overblown serial killer movie nonsense, full of grand declarations of intellectual depth that doesn’t actually exist, ridiculous murder rituals this film isn’t even clever enough to make as creepy as they should be, and taking place in a world where characters are probably even accompanied by Very Dramatic Music™ when they are on the loo.

Housewife (2017): I absolutely adored director Can Evrenol’s Baskin, but this, his second feature, is quite a step back, despite hitting some of my favourite horror and weird fic elements, namely a creepy cult, a protagonist who can’t quite understand if she’s dreaming or not, and creepy flesh masks. Evrenol seems to be trying to formally emulate the dream logic of Italian 80s horror, but for much of the film’s running time, he doesn’t hit the proper mood of a bizarre and unpleasant dream but more the randomness of actual dreams, which simply isn’t terribly interesting to watch. There are a couple or three effective scenes here to show that Baskin wasn’t an accident, but most of what we get is aimless meandering.

The film also suffers badly from the decision to have a cast of non-native English speakers speak English dialogue, adding a stilted and unnatural quality that may have been meant to add to the film’s unreal mood but in practice makes the already pretty awkward dialogue difficult to make out and puts another layer of distance between audience and characters when they badly need to feel as close to the audience as possible.


The California Kid (1974): Which leaves this post’s role of “The Good Film” to this unassuming 70s TV movie by Richard T. Heffron in which drag riding Martin Sheen takes revenge on Sheriff Vic Morrow who purposely drove his brother and others off a mountain road. It’s not a tight, Duel-style thrill ride but more interested in a  very 70s exploration of characters on the side-lines of life, while having some thoughts about the reasons why good people look away from bad acts, usually avoiding the melodrama that can come with the TV territory. Heffron’s direction is not spectacular but makes nice use of its California locations and knows how to provide space for a cast that also features a young Nick Nolte, Michelle Phillips and Stuart Margolin.