Devil, a new occult thriller, from a story by M. Night Shyamalan, opens with a series of shots that turns the very pretty Philadelphia skyline upside down; the camera zooms, pans and tracks in vertiginous fly-overs. It’s creepy and unsettling ((and clever, did the post-production team 'flip’ the image or was it shot that way?). I guess for director John Erik Dowdle (Quarantine) this was a way to 'cue’ us for the topsy-turvy action to come. Trouble is, Devil never really makes good on the diabolical promise set up in its opening moments.
To reduce it to basics, Devil is a movie about five people who get stuck in an elevator. Since the movie begins with a voice-over about Satan, we know that mechanical trouble can’t be blamed. And since Shyamalan likes to play his moral economy straightforwardly, the five passengers all have their share of 'demons’. There’s a black security guard, Ben (Bokeem Woodbine), who’s got a history of violence; a haunted war Marine veteran, Tony (Logan Marshall-Green); a mysterious and grumpy Old Woman (Jenny O’Hara); a larcenous salesman, Vince (Geoffrey Arend) who’s seven parts sleaze and three parts smarm; and a very pretty young woman, Sarah (local actor Bojana Novakovic), with an adult life of deceit behind her. All of them are strangers and all are, clearly, 'sinners'.
It’s not giving anything away to reveal that at some point some of these characters are going to die. Is a murderer on board? The cop in charge of the rescue operation, Bowden (Chris Messina) certainly thinks so. He’s absolutely convinced that it not the Devil’s work, which is the opinion of security guard Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), who keeps seeing horrible 'visions’ on the elevator CCTV. This compels him to advance the theory to Bowden that occasionally the Devil likes to visit the earth and punish his victims before sending them onto Hell. Actually, just what is going is in fact a non-question; we know from the start he's responsible. (Like Shyamalan, Dowdle and screenwriter Brian Nelson aren’t interested in creating the possibility that there’s a 'rational’ terrestrial explanation for weird stuff.)
The suspense of the movie is split between two questions: When will the Devil show 'his’ face? When will Bowden, a non-believer, cross over and take up Faith?
If you want to take it seriously Devil, is in that great tradition of genre thrillers that propose a moral dilemma; at what point can we afford to abandon free-will, call it rational thought, and give into the dark side of our nature – call it, instinct?
Still, I’m making this sound a lot more earnest and po-faced than it actually is; Devil isn’t even close to the sanctimonious of, say, Shyamalan’s Signs. This is more in the unpretentious tradition of TV’s The Twilight Zone, but with more blood and a very big body count. Actually, aside from its routine premise, and cranking plot mechanics, the film has its share of really good shock moments; at times the frights come simply because the sound suddenly explodes in a big bang.
The cast are all pretty credible; they keep the thing alive and kicking by never camping it up. We can buy into the movie’s goofy conceit because whenever Dowdle cuts to a close up on the victims... we can read the fear in their eyes.
