My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Exorcism stories are nothing new in horror. Neither are 1980s period pieces. But sometimes even well-trod ground can be combined to create something special. Such was the case in 2016 when Grady Hendrix released his novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism. The book is an excellent study of a teen friendship, set in the South Carolina of Hendrix’s youth. It is a wonderful mix of horror, comedy, and becomes genuinely moving by the end. When a film adaption was announced, the first of Hendrix’s novels to be brought to the screen, I was very much anticipating it. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to the source material.

The film introduces the two main characters, Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller). The girls are best friends and attend a local Catholic High School together. Abby is nervous because Gretchen will soon be moving away, and there’s no one else she is as close to. Gretchen promises that they’ll stay friends. As a way to cheer each other up, Gretchen and Abby agree join two of their other friends, Margaret (Rachel Ogechi Kanu) and Glee (Cathy Ang) at a lake house for a “girls bonding trip”. When the girls quickly get bored on the trip, they break out an Ouija Board to play with.

This turns out to be a planned ruse by Margaret as a way to have the party is crashed by her creep boyfriend Wallace (Clayton Royal Johnson) who offers the girls LSD. While the rest of the group soon goes skinny dipping, Abby refuses, as her acne makes her unwilling to swim and wash off her carefully applied makeup. When most of the others start giving her a hard time, Gretchen stands up for her friend, and the two head out for a walk in the woods. During this walk, they come upon an abandoned building which Margaret had earlier told them was rumored to be the site of a Satanic sacrifice. Playing on their shared love of scary movies, Gretchen convinces Abby to go into the house with her. At this point, it appears that the drugs start to kick in, as the girls start hearing and seeing things. The noises scare Abby who runs out of the building, but strange voices lead Gretchen deeper in. Abby brings the other girls back and they find Gretchen breaking down and having been terrorized by something.

Over the next few days, Gretchen’s personality begins to change. She turns cruel, playing nearly
deadly pranks on Glee and Margaret, and hurting Abby’s feelings at every turn. But there are moments
when Abby can see her friend’s true self shine through. Times when Gretchen asks for help. Along with
some other clues, this leads Abby to believe that Gretchen is possessed by something. She goes to
Christian Lemon (Chris Lowell) for help. Lemon and his brothers are a team of evangelical weightlifters
(based on the real-life group The Power Team) who had recently been at the girls’s school. Lemon is
excited to have a chance to try the titular exorcism. The results of that exorcism make up the remainder
of the film.

The limits of transforming a novel to a screenplay lead to the primary problems with the film.
Jenna Lamia’s script isn’t bad per se (mostly. That ending is a disappointment), but the film’s short
runtime means that depth of relationship is sacrificed to the machinations of plot. We know that
Gretchen and Abby are best friends only because the film tells us so. There isn’t time to devote to
exploring the relationship. The main beats of the book are here, but it is a skeletal frame not fleshed out
by the emotion that made readers care about these characters and what happened to them. It’s a story
that would have been better served by a longer film, or a short, limited television series. Too much is lost
here. Damon Thomas’s direction is middle-of-the-road. There is nothing which stands out as especially
good or especially bad. The 80s setting is primarily established with clothing and some predictable song choices. This is another unfortunate loss from the book, where the 80s “Satanic Panic” served as a
perfect framework for the action.

On the positive side, the lead performances from Fisher and Miller are very good. Having seen Fisher previously in Eighth Grade, I had no doubt that she would do well here. Miller was an unknown quantity going in, but she was very impressive. She does an excellent job of showing all sides of Gretchen’s personality throughout the possession, essentially playing several roles in one. Given the source material, expectations are set high for this one. It’s not a terrible way to spend an hour and a half if you have Amazon, but it could have been much more.