Boorman And The Devil – Venice review

David Kittredge’s documentary reframes one of Hollywood’s greatest disasters into a hypnotic study of vision, collapse, and the strange beauty of failure.

★★★★

There’s no better making-of documentary than one that unpicks a film maudit. Jeffrey McHale proved that with You Don’t Nomi, an incisive re-examination of Showgirls’ fall and resurrection. Michael Stephenson’s Best Worst Movie did the same for Troll 2, a catastrophe so complete it became a cult phenomenon. Kittredge’s Boorman and the Devil now joins their ranks, turning the same lens on The Exorcist II: The Heretic, arguably the most reviled studio sequel of the 1970s. And frankly, who wouldn’t rather watch the chronicle of that cursed production than another retelling of The Exorcist’s triumph? The fascination lies in the catastrophe.

The film takes us through the whole journey: Warner Brothers’ offer of a prestige sequel, director John Boorman’s decision to chase metaphysics instead of horror, and a shoot plagued by calamity. Illness felled the director. Lee J. Cobb’s death forced last-minute rewrites. Richard Burton arrived in no state to carry a blockbuster. Linda Blair narrowly survived a potentially fatal skyscraper stunt. What Boorman intended as a philosophical epic, anchored by Garrett Brown’s gliding Steadicam, Ennio Morricone’s incantatory score, and monumental sets, collapsed under the weight of misfortune and disregard for commercial expectation. Viewers expecting more of the same, but with more gore, were left bamboozled – and even angry – by an eccentric tale of hypnotherapy, locusts and spiritual evolution. Boorman and the Devil makes clear how every choice pulled the production further from the audience and closer to catastrophe, leading to a masterpiece of cinematic ruin.

Yet like Showgirls in McHale’s film, The Heretic is suggested to be both utterly sublime and total claptrap at the same time, a synthesis that resists dismissal. Too genuinely ambitious to be mere camp, too erratic to be conventionally great, but unmistakably alive – the most hypnotic of Hollywood misfires. Kittredge calls it “one of the most hypnotic, subversive and misunderstood studio films in Hollywood history,” Some films just seem to be a series of actors saying and doing things in service of a story. Others are living dreams. The Heretic belongs to the latter. Not necessarily a good dream, but a dream all the same – convincingly outside our world, demanding a leap of faith for us to land inside it, if we can.

Alongside John Boorman, Linda Blair, and Louise Fletcher, the talking heads include Karyn Kusama and Mike Flanagan. The latter is billed here as the director of Untitled 2026 Exorcist Project, though news has just broken of his exit, just days before Boorman and the Devil premiered. One can’t help but wonder: did a stint inside a documentary about The Heretic give him too many worrying ideas about what might be worth bringing to the table? Every frame of The Heretic bears the mark of ambition, however misguided. In an industry now driven by safe content algorithms, Boorman’s implosion looks bracing: a reminder that cinema is built on gambles, not on frictionless competence, and pure intent brings the most exquisite of tragedies.

The Exorcist II: The Heretic may be one of Hollywood’s most derided sequels, but through Kittredge’s film it becomes something else: a monument to risk, a cautionary tale, and an ode to the artistic imperative to pursue a vision. Boorman and the Devil turns a financial disaster into a thoughtful, kind, and ultimately moving look into what it truly means to be creative. Begone, artless craftsmen. Let the visionaries return. Here’s to ‘bad art.’ It’s the second word that matters.

Boorman and the Devil premiered today at the Venice Film Festival