REVIEW: Devil



A claustrophobic thug, an elderly kleptomaniac, a marital blackmailer, crooked mattress salesman and a returned war veteran walk into an elevator and the Devil says, “I’m going to kill you all and take your souls”. As far as jokes go, it’s a lousy punch line, but you have to admit the set-up almost had you interested. And that’s pretty much the way things pan out in the M. Night Shyamalan (The Happening) inspired and John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) directed, Devil. Reasonable premise, executed poorly.

Opening with a series of inverted shots of the city – evil has the world turned upside down – and a plummeting body that sets the events of the film in motion, Devil begins with promise. But once the five hapless occupants board a skyscraper elevator bound for damnation the film gradually loses it way.

Unlike the audacious Rodrigo Cortés film Buried, which restricted its entire screen time to the confined space of a coffin, the action in Devil shifts between the elevator’s inhabitants and the outside police and building workers who are attempting to free them. Rather than exploit anxieties of claustrophobia and desperation, Dowdle instead directs Devil as a more traditional conflict over good and evil, between uniformed authority and disguised malevolence.

But the film is let down by some clunky narrative devices. An intermittent voice-over should have been excised at the scripting stage, a lead’s back-story is revealed far too early (with obvious ramifications), while the dialogue overemphasises its dramatic intentions. Playing to the racial, gender, age and class tensions of the occupants – it predictably ticks all those boxes – Devil undermines a potentially engaging narrative by relying on poorly manufactured stereotypes and stock dialogue.

Devil even self-consciously alerts the audience to its formulaic approach. Adopting a critical perspective in respect of its generic (and somewhat implausible) supernatural plot, in one scene the film pauses for reflection. Overhearing a security guard account for the events in the elevator as the work of Satan, the detective in charge of the rescue effort dismissively retorts, “Is this guy for real?”

What’s more frustrating is that in spite of this singular moment of self-mockery, Devil ultimately maintains a conventional trajectory right through to its moralising religious denouement that, “If the Devil is real, then God must be real too”. After sitting through yet another Shyamalan-associated failure, it’s probable that some people may question the second part of that statement.

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