Film Review: The Devil Inside
Review by Dustin Hall
And so it is, with the first major horror release of the year, that 2012 opens with a shrug. Whilst I’d hoped for positive omens for a better film year than 2011, it’s perhaps a bit of déjà vu that last year began with The Rite as the first major horror flick, a film with more than a few striking similarities to The Devil Inside.
The Devil Inside opens with a 911 call from a Maria Rossi (Susan Crowley), who sounds weak and crazed, claiming to have just killed three people. The police arrive to find the call was no hoax: three members of the clergy have been brutally murdered by Rossi during a failed exorcism. Skip ahead twenty years, and Maria’s daughter Isabella (Andrade) comes to visit her mother in a Vatican asylum, where she has since been committed and isolated. She brings a cameraman with her because, well, frankly because it was cheap to make a found footage movie. There’s not a lot of logic to her decision otherwise.
After visiting her mother, where she finds that Maria still reacts violently to religious paraphernalia and is covered in cuts that form inverted crosses, Isabella becomes obsessed with exorcism, and brings two rogue priests into her investigation. The two priests believe that demonic possession is real and rampant, and will perform them even without the approval of the church. The quartet forms an alliance to exorcise Maria’s demons while filming it, in order to prove to the church the validity of their work, and of course hijinks ensue.
Generally,The Devil Inside is not a poor film, though it treads heavily on well-worn film material. The main problem it has, and this is something that plagues most, if not all, found footage films, is that there’s no resolution, and barely a climax. The film just stops. The first act of the movie sets up the characters, the relations, and we have a short exorcism to show the audience that, hey, this shit is real. The second act is where all the action finally takes place, with the crew working on Maria’s exorcism: this is where all those cool shots from the trailer come from. There’s actually some pretty good demonic action going on here, with some crazy telekinesis, blood, and multiple possessions flying left and right. The further the movie goes, the more frantic it becomes, and the more interesting. And then, just as the pivotal third act would begin and the highest point of action would be upon us, just as the stakes would be raised, and the characters forced to resolve their personal weaknesses and close off their story arcs… the movie ends. “This case remains unsolved.” Credits. At a run-time of less than 90 minutes.
So, um, spoiler alert, here’s how it ends: the audience sits back in their chairs, throws up their hands and goes “Awww”. That one really loud guy in the theater goes “WHAT?! Come on!” Somebody throws something. The end.
Its just the script that holds the movie back. The visuals look good enough, and the cast works really hard with what they’re given. Andrade, Quarterman and Helmuth (the latter two as the previously mentioned rogue priests) may not be the strongest cast ever, but you can tell that they are committed to their roles. The exorcism genre always has a following; the screening in Vegas was packed to the gills, with a line going around the corner of the building and an audience that was skewed heavily towards Latino and Catholic. Everyone seemed to be very interested in the material, and the more sensitive viewers cringed and yelped through the exorcism sequences. With a built in audience like this, and committed creators, you’d think the film would be a shoe-in.
Unfortunately, the script lacks in originality. Ever since The Exorcist, the genre has been filled with imitators who use the same tropes, over and over again. Girl is tied to bed. Girl screams a lot. Girl talks about fucking everybody. There are inverted crosses because the writers know about Hammer Horror but not about St. Peter. It’s the same old sequence, this time fused with bits from a few other recent exorcism films. There’s an emphasis on bodily contortion as seen in Emily Rose, the found footage angle as used in The Last Exorcism, then the night-vision starved-monster shots are pulled from REC, the exorcism classes and much of the plot (plus pretty much all of its twists) are pulled directly from The Rite. In fact, the story is so similar to The Rite, I almost thought I’d fallen through a worm-hole into 2011, and found myself facing some sort of The Rite/Last Exorcism love child.
Despite all of this, I watched the audience I was with and found them to be generally entertained. A couple of laughs, a few jumps, all most people need to really enjoy a night at the movies. I have to admit, I’ve seen more of these movies than most of the audience, and they’ve turned me into a cynical bastard. So I like to watch the audience and, if they really like the movie, I can’t say it’s a failure.
But that ending (or lack thereof)? Man, it really killed the experience for so many people. The found footage genre is generally ok, but despite its overuse, filmmakers have yet to figure out how to utilize it to tell a complete story, and films like this really suffer for it.
Our next wide release is Underworld 4; let’s hope the year picks up quickly.
