My Best Friend’s Exorcism Parent Guide

The usual high school drama that plagues best friends Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller) is going into overdrive. Their mutual friend Margaret (Rachel Ogechi Kanu) has started dating a real jerk, Abby’s developed a crush on one of her teachers, and worst of all, Gretchen’s family has decided to move away at the end of the school year. But when the girls take a weekend trip out to a lake house, things take a turn for the worse. Margaret’s repulsive boyfriend has brought LSD, and the girls take a strange trip. Abby and Gretchen wind up in an abandoned old house in the woods – and Gretchen doesn’t seem quite the same afterward…

Abby assumes her best friend is suffering from a bad reaction to the acid, but since it didn’t seem to affect anyone else at all, she starts to wonder what else could be going on. When Gretchen starts vomiting green bile, sabotaging her friends, and withdrawing from their friendship, Abby begins to wonder if she’s really still her BFF…or if something else has hitched a ride inside Gretchen.

I spent most of the film’s runtime trying to work out whether My Best Friend’s Exorcism suffered from awful dialogue and worse acting, or awful acting and worse dialogue. By the midway point, I had reached a conclusion: I didn’t care anymore and I wished the movie had ended half an hour ago. Worse than either the acting or the dialogue is the plot, which I think is part of some broad conspiracy designed to make audiences throw heavy objects at their TVs. The film bounces between references to rape, self-harm, and anorexia to painfully inane moments. For instance, the titular exorcism boils down to “The power of friendship compels you” which really sucks the wind out of the scene. Not that there was much there to start with, you understand.

I would recommend mixing broken glass and vinegar into your breakfast cereal before I’d suggest you watch this dreadful time sink. The filmmakers claim it’s only 97 minutes in length, but that’s an optimistic description which forgets the Cinematic Relativity Principle: The worse a film is, the longer it feels. From that perspective, this is a four-hour death march through some vague sense of nostalgia as written by an unhinged fiend, determined to drive you to drink – or, at least, to turn off the movie. Luckily, the rest of you have that option. Thanks to my dubious career choices, I was trapped in front of this mess for the duration. And I can tell you, between the petty bullying, profanity, teen substance abuse, and mind-bendingly unlikeable characters, this is a film you don’t want to start watching in the first place.