The X-Files: I Want to Believe Director's Cut Makes a Bad Movie Worse

There are two X-Files movies, and neither one needs a director's cut. The first, 1998's The X-Files: Fight the Future, is already the perfect summer blockbuster. The second, 2008's The X-Files: I Want to Believe, is beyond saving. Still, The X-Files loves a lost cause, so I Want to Believe now has a director's cut.

Series creator Chris Carter has touted this update — which arrived on Hulu and Disney+ on Friday, complete with a silly new subtitle, Vrach Frankenshteyn — as scarier than the original version. It's the R-rated movie that Carter, who directed the film and co-wrote it with Frank Spotnitz, says he always wanted fans to see. But it doesn't actually inject much extra gore or violence into the picture. Running almost seven minutes shorter than the original, this is a director's cut that defines itself by what it cuts out of the original movie, and the pattern that emerges isn't subtle. This is Carter's no-romance cut. In recent interviews, Carter has suggested that whatever attention the original movie pays to the relationship between former FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) distracts from the gruesomeness of the case they're investigating, and that pulling back on the romance is meant to highlight the horror. In the end, though, the movie loses its weak emotional anchor without getting any scarier. 

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First, a summary of what's on the cutting room floor: Carter has cut all confirmation that Mulder and Scully live together, removing dialogue about "our house" and Scully telling Mulder why she fell in love with him, along with each of the pair's two kisses. The first of those kisses comes during a scene in bed that's been butchered down to the bones, stripped of its innuendo and charm. But because it segues into a conversation about the case, it couldn't be cut entirely, meaning that the director's cut, which otherwise refuses to acknowledge anything romantic between Mulder and Scully, suddenly jumps to Scully telling Mulder about a toxicology report while they're in bed together. 

This scene, like what's left of the scene late in the movie that once ended with their other kiss, feels out of place now, hinting at something the rest of the film is trying to hide. And if Mulder and Scully's relationship is harder to define in this director's cut, the uncertainty doesn't feel profound in the way it did during the best years of The X-Files. It just makes the movie seem uninterested in its own characters. Other references to Mulder's and Scully's pasts are removed, too, including conversations about Mulder's sister, Samantha, who was abducted when they were kids, and Mulder and Scully's son, William, the baby Scully gave up for adoption during the final season of the original series. Given that Scully's plotline in I Want to Believe seems designed to gesture at her grief and guilt over her son, the fact that he's never mentioned is disorienting.

The plot of the movie hasn't changed. Mulder and Scully, years after going on the run from the government, are contacted by the FBI, which promises to drop all charges against Mulder in exchange for his help. An agent has gone missing, and a convicted pedophile and disgraced ex-priest, Father Joe (Billy Connolly), claims to have a psychic connection to the case. Mulder teams up with an ASAC by the name of Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and follows the bloody trail of the investigation to an an organ harvesting ring conducting experimental transplants, while Scully, who's now working as a doctor at a Catholic hospital, fights to save one of her patients, a boy named Christian (Marco Niccoli) with a seemingly terminal illness.

It's a strange, deliberately off-putting story, which would be easier to respect if it were executed better. Instead, I Want to Believe sets up a series of provocative storylines and then looks away from their offensive implications. Father Joe is lionized as a repentant sinner by everyone but Scully; even Mulder defends the defrocked priest's honor, without any attempt to reconcile that attitude with his typical care for child victims after the loss of his sister. And the villains conducting grisly Frankensteinian experiments are killing in the name of gay love, beheading the kidnapped FBI agent so her body can go to a man who is dying of cancer — a gay man (whose marriage comes with the qualifier "in the state of Massachusetts") who was one of Father Joe's victims decades earlier. 

The director's cut does nothing to temper the inherent homophobia and transphobia of this premise. If it really had ramped up the terror, the fearmongering subtext would have gotten even worse. As it is, one striking new burst of violence happens in the moment of Whitney's death, which comes at the hands of the sick man's husband, but the changes to the head transplant storyline are otherwise so slight that it mostly raises the question of why no one looking at this movie in 2026 had any concerns about its implications. Why revisit this story at all?

It wasn't for the characters at the center of the franchise. And you can think whatever you want about the nature of Mulder and Scully's relationship. I like to believe that the supposedly stark divide between X-Files fans — those who want romance and those who don't — is mostly semantic, even if the definition at stake is a big one (how do you define love?), and that anyone who enjoys the characters agrees that what's most interesting about Mulder and Scully's dynamic defies categorization. But in the case of this movie, when you take out those hints of romance, there's almost nothing left. Neither iteration of I Want to Believe captures how intense their relationship is. It's a lackluster movie in which Mulder and Scully occasionally talk about what it means to share a home. Without the shared home, they don't have much to say.

In the original cut of the movie, most of the conflict between Mulder and Scully is framed in terms of that house. When Scully balks at Mulder's investment in the case, even though she's the one who asked him to get involved in the first place, she tells him that she won't be coming home. The fight is confusing; it's not clear why she's so upset or how long she intends to not come home. By cutting this line, the director's cut avoids that confusion. But in exchange, it loses the sense that these are, in Scully's words, "two people who come home at night." It replaces the unanswered question of what Mulder and Scully are arguing about about with the unexplored question of what their relationship is. The movie was already incoherent; now it's blander, too.

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Obviously, trimming a bad movie also has its upsides. Carter wisely does away with a couple of cringeworthy gags from the original, loses some pointless lines, and tightens up transitions between scenes. But the fact that the case moves with more energy still can't give it purpose. A Frankenstein story (which The X-Files already did much better in Season 5's "The Post-Modern Prometheus") comes with a lot of thematic potential. Why not acknowledge the loved ones who haunt Mulder and Scully's story? Why focus on a man who is trying to keep his spouse alive, even brutally, without properly exploring what Mulder and Scully do to keep each other alive and whether it requires reshaping themselves in the process? You could argue that the original version of I Want to Believe is at least trying to have that conversation, even if it doesn't make any sense. The director's cut barely has room to try.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the equivalent of one of the show's monster-of-the-week episodes, a standalone mystery designed to be accessible to audiences who aren't up to date on the franchise's mythology. It's difficult to tell a scary story without investing in the characters, though. Set in a forbidding, wintry wilderness, the movie looks the part; it always has. But the director's cut, even more than the original cut, is too cold, leaving Mulder and Scully to wander through the story like reanimated versions of themselves.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.