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.