Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 October 24 • Friday

Nicholas Condé's The Religion was made into a movie called The Believers. It was directed by John Schlesinger and starred Martin Sheen.

It's probably an okay movie if you haven't read the book. But if you have read the book, you're likely to be disappointed by how the story has been reshaped into a more conventional and less compelling drama/thriller with some supernatural stuff thrown in.

Which is a shame, because J. Peter Robinson contributed great music and Robert Müller's photography is consistently nice to look at. The acting is great from everyone and New York City locations are used effectively.

The basic story is the same. Recently widowed father with his young son get involved in an underground sort of voodoo thing that involves rich and powerful people. Young children are being murdered for this cult and the main character's son has been marked for sacrifice.

But the movie doesn't develop the same kind of paranoid dread that suffuses the book. There are attempts to put signifiers in the backgrounds of scenes: posters for old magicians, unicorn statuettes, evangelists on TV, etc., but they don't really do much.

In the book, the motives of the child murderers were actually good. They were making sacrifices to the gods to prevent some kind of event that would kill millions. The last time they tried to do this and weren't able to complete the ritual, it allowed World War Two and the holocaust to happen.

In the movie it's just rich and powerful people who've found a shortcut to more wealth and power for themselves. This is boring and over familiar and also makes them less interesting as characters.

The book has a devastating final twist at the end but the movie has painted itself into a corner where it ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Still, there are a couple of moments of real horror, especially one involving spiders that will not be for the squeamish.