With producer M. Night Shyamalan’s name displayed so prominently in the advertising for Devil, it is awfully easy to forget that its director is a certain John Erick Dowdle, who sealed off a building and pumped scares into it once before with 2008’s Quarantine, the American remake of the Spanish horror film REC.
And given the way audiences react to Shyamalan’s patronage – typically bursting into laughter at the sight of his name after seeming to fall under the sway of what started as an undeniably creepy trailer – one wonders why the marketing emphasized his involvement.
| Devil
Directed by John Erick Dowdle. |
Nonetheless, it’s a fitting introduction to the film, because in a very real sense Devil retreads ground Shyamalan covered in Signs: a traumatic event involving forces beyond human experience or comprehension interlocks with a personal, individual catharsis.
It begins with a suicide. So says the narrator (even though we just saw the suicide ourselves), a painfully unnecessary stereotype of the superstitious Latino-Christian variety, who shortly appears within the story as a security guard to play the wise fool for the rest of the proceedings.
And this is after the same narrating voiceover parrots a manifestly redundant epigraph, the first sign of a movie that doesn’t respect its audience one bit.
Five strangers get into an elevator, which then stops between floors and begins to suffer power irregularities. This is how it goes, we are assured by security guard Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), as the devil chooses his next victims and toys with them.
Meanwhile, Detective Bowden (Chris Messina), recovering from alcoholism triggered by the death of his wife and child in a hit-and-run accident, arrives on the scene to investigate the suicide and realizes there may be a connection between the two events.
By giving away the involvement of the devil up front (in the title, no less) the film backs itself into a corner: the only way to keep the audience intrigued is to deny them a piece of the puzzle while assuring them there’s something to it beyond Lucifer playing at marbles with human souls. Our hero-detective even gets the line “I’m missing something here,” just to make sure everybody’s keeping up to speed.
But that lone puzzle piece isn’t enough, which is why, despite showing some promise early on, Devil simply doesn’t muster a whole lot in the way of tension (you can forget about outright horror), even with an exuberantly brass-heavy score by Fernando Velázquez that consistently evokes Hans Zimmer’s work on Inception.
The sweeping, Panic Room-ish cinematography of the opening scenes, including a lobby-spanning tracking shot that first unites all five elevator victims before they leave the ground floor, hints at greater things to come; but they never materialize.
The way to make a movie like this really effective would be to lock the audience in the elevator with the victims – at length, if not for the entire movie. (Buried, opening Friday, promises to do just that with Ryan Reynolds and a premature coffin.) But neither the screenplay nor the actors involved can sustain our interest in this hermetic little space, so we flip back and forth from the elevator to the security guards to the police detective going through the motions.
If you bought the alien invasion in Signs as a mechanism for Mel Gibson’s preacher to regain his faith, you may derive some kernel of satisfaction from Devil as the final puzzle piece falls into place. But it won’t be enough to make a recommendation of this one.