Upon entering the theater to see Devil, one hopes for a viewing experience as rich as, say, devil’s food cake. At the same time, one fears the involvement of M. Night Shyamalan might translate into a huge deviled egg on the screen. The actual results fall somewhere in between, forming a cheap snack that’s a bit tasty, kinda gooey, but ultimately forgettable–sorta like eating a Devil Dog.
Just a decade ago, Shyamalan was being praised as a successor to Hitchcock on the surprise success of The Sixth Sense. But his subsequent output has gone from weak to bad to worse–The Happening was perhaps the dumbest movie I have ever sat through, and, although I avoided it entirely, my colleague here on the site was decidedly unimpressed with The Last Airbender. The writer-director’s name now seems to elicit more groans than excitement from audiences.
This time, although his name is emphasized in the advertising, Shyamalan is only the producer and creator of the original story, handing off the screenwriting and directing duties respectively to Brian Nelson (30 Days Of Night) and John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine). The kickoff to a purported series of features, Devil offers its first fearful moment when a large numeral 1 appears after the opening logo of “The Night Chronicles.” Shyamalan is molding himself more like Hitchcock, whose own renown increased all the more with the TV anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, of which he directed only a handful of episodes. The comparison seems even more apropos when considering Devil as a promising but flimsy thriller that would have been better received as an episode of Night Gallery.
Upside-down Philadelphia cityscapes are cleverly disorienting, yet not so effective when coupled with clumsy voice-over narration to introduce us to the premise: the Devil walks among us, torturing torment-worthy souls prior to death. On this day, his malice is made manifest by trapping five seemingly random people in an elevator halfway up a high-rise office tower. They’re a perfect sampling of stereotypes: the sullen blue-collar guy (Logan Marshall-Green), the smarmy white-collar jerk (Geoffrey Arend), the paranoid old lady (Jenny O’Hara), the vaguely exotic hot chick (Bojana Novakovic), and the token minority and authority representative (Bokeem Woodbine).
Isolated in this tight spot, they can be seen but not heard by two security guards, as well as a police detective (Chris Messina) drawn to the building by a suicide. As rescue efforts escalate, so does the body count. Soon, the Hispanic guard is trying to convince the Caucasian officers in the security station that el Diablo is at work. This movie follows the established Hollywood cliché that only Catholics can recognize the Devil. (Further extrapolating La-La Land’s religious logic, Jews and Catholics exclusively populate big cities, while Protestants and their churches are only in the suburbs and the South.)
Devil is clearly a B-movie, though that is not always to its detriment. There are more than a few lines of dialogue and stagey moments that will challenge the cinematically lactose-intolerant. However, the lack of well-known cast members (Bokeem Woodbine was the only one I recognized, from his role as the hilariously monikered rapper Massive Genius on The Sopranos) keeps the audience from too many preconceived notions of whodunit. The audio mixing is effectively creepy, especially when the lights go out in the elevator and the screen goes black. In an already darkened theater, it’s reminiscent of going through a low-budget haunted house where customers stumble through a pitch black maze while getting pawed at by “monsters.”
Despite the intriguing and potentially claustrophobic premise, Devil fails to build much visceral tension, partly because it doesn’t focus enough on the five people trapped inside the elevator. Instead, a strange distancing effect is created by the lack of details and the inclusion of the detective and guards watching them on a monitor. It’s like we’re all watching a half-price staging of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians and trying to guess which one is the killer. By the time the disappointing climax and boringly moralistic denouement arrive, you may only be grateful for the relatively short running time.
With some minor tweaks, Devil could have been a watercooler-talk TV-movie or a very memorable episode of The Twilight Zone or The X-Files. As a theatrical release, however, it’s just too weak. I don’t know if the devil cares, but I would expect a film titled God to be pretty awesome. So when a movie with the imposing title of Devil turns out to be a letdown, well, let’s just say I have some sympathy for him. What’s puzzling me is the nature of his game.
Related posts: