Do you need to be told high school is Hell? Sure, you can laugh about it now, but if Christian Lemon (Christopher Lowell) has it right, there’s at least one demon in every class. If not meant as a hybrid of ’80s teen comedy and horror film, My Best Friend’s Exorcism could almost be a documentary. Luckily, the Prime Video adaptation of Grady Hendrix’s novel serves as entertainment, not a warning.
Teleplay writer Jenna Lamia and director Damon Thomas soften Hendrix’s book a bit. The mean girls aren’t quite as mean, and the class consciousness definitely takes a back seat. But My Best Friend’s Exorcism still tells a fun story.
As the title suggest, best friends Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller) find friction in their friendship when a demon comes between them. As a scholarship student at their exclusive private Catholic school, Abby doesn’t fit in too well, but neither does rich girl Gretchen. Repressed and lightly resentful of her parents, Gretchen looks to Abby for a window into pop culture. They still have sleepovers, renting horror movies on the weekend and just having fun.
Joining other rich girls Margaret (Rachel Ogechi Kanu) and Glee (Cathy Ang) for a weekend at Margaret’s lake house should have been a nice getaway. As in many horror films, four unsupervised teen girls will quickly move from gossip to the Ouja board. After blithely contacting a demon, they experiment with LSD brought by Margaret’s dumb jock boyfriend Wallace Stoney (Clayton Royal Johnson). Maybe the tabs are just paper. Or maybe as Gretchen and Abby go for a walk in the woods, they’re a doorway.
Of course they go into the abandoned house in the woods where urban legend says a girl was killed years before. (I’m not knocking it; the past three years have proven that even reasonable adults do dumb things.) Of course the acid kicks in and they see things moving that shouldn’t be. In a moment of terror, Abby runs and Gretchen doesn’t get away.
And then the murders begin.
Actually, no, they don’t. Again, the nastiness is toned down from the book, but when Gretchen recovers, things have changed. She swings from neediness to resentment, then suddenly gets herself together — way more together than she was before. She’s downright seductive and sets Abby up for embarrassment at a school carnival. All of this could be chalked up to normal teen behavior, unfortunately. Except when the school has a presentation from the Lemon Brothers, essentially Bros for Jesus, one brother notices that something is very wrong with Gretchen.
The movie moves swiftly along, just offering a taste of most set pieces and collapsing the book’s several weeks into just a few days. You get a sense of all the underlying issues driving the conflicts, but Thomas drives toward that exorcism with laser focus. It’s fun and strangely breezy for its subject matter, but if you want deep dark tonal shifts, Hendrix’s book is still there and worth the read.
To that, the cast is note perfect. Fisher inhabits Abby as she does most of her roles. She’s kind and awkward and real. As Gretchen, Miller has to reflect Abby, but also contrast stereotypical mousiness with blossoming into a mean girl. Balancing between being a Heather and an actual demon, she keeps it controlled. High school is hell, but part of its hellishness lies in its keeping that part hidden.
In other roles, Lowell has proven range, but reading the book he was exactly who I thought of as Christian, and he’s as funny as I expected. Again to the casting, while reading I didn’t picture any other actor but Fisher as Abby, even before I knew who was cast.
If you have to choose among teen-friendly horror films to watch this weekend, My Best Friend’s Exorcism should be top of the list to start the Halloween season off. You can get to the witches later; remember that even they answer to demons.
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