Wednesday 28 March 2012

Film Review: 'The Devil Inside'





Paranormal Activity, you may recall (if you have any fond inclination toward the horror genre) simultaneously marked a return to form for both atmosphere-led, suspenseful horror and the faux-realistic 'mocumentary' genre first given to us in the form of The Blair Witch Project. The film was a joy to horror afficionadoes and anyone who enjoyed being scared when it was released a couple of years ago. However, with each passing instalment (the odd exceptional shock aside) the Paranormal Activity franchise gradually began to dwindle in both quality and originality.

With this logic in place, one could be forgive for thinking The Devil Inside could very easily be Paranormal Activity VIIII, for all its lack of genuine shock, originality and rinsing of its genre's tropes. Its most effective scares -and let's not mistake 'most effective' for 'genuinely shocking'- already over-exposed from its widely viewed trailer (which mainly consist of extended periods of calm followed by gratuitous 'jump' moments that are too expected to actually work), The Devil Inside never really rises above occasionally creepy.

It begins promisingly enough, with a rather unsettling recording of a phone call to the police from Maria Rossi, protagonist Isabella's mother, confessing to the murders of three participants of an exorcism. It then cuts to vintage footage (the only real aesthetic triumph of the film) of a news report and investigation in the wake of the discovery. From then on, unfortunately, the film takes a severe dive that it never manages to recover from.

Jump to the present day, the relentlessly unlikeable Isabella (who constantly sways between helpless female cliche and hard-done-by victim demanding answers) is making a documentary about her mother's demonic possession, jetting to Vatican City where she is being held in psychiatric care. There is then a good thirty minutes, littered with some questionable acting and dialogue, before anything attempting to scare us happens again. During this time we are introduced to a pair of rogue exorcists who perform the ritual without consent of the church and would probably be more suited to their own '80s drama series than a supposedly serious documentary film, and reintroduced to the only good thing The Devil Inside has going for it, the frustratingly underused Maria Rossi, whos two brief scenes are the only genunely creepy sequences the film has to offer.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about The Devil Inside is that it continually tiptoes around a fairly interesting premise; there are hints at corrupt Vatican officials, a global conspiracy to sweep severe cases of possession under the rug and a malevolent demon that can jump from person to person, but these are all largely untouched plot elements that ammount to little or nothing. What's left is barely more than an hour of limp shocks (the biggest audience reaction came from an angry dog barking), gratuitous Exorcist riffs and oblique, futile references to what could have been. Furthermore, where even the less effective mocumentaries at least fall back on the admirable naturalism of the acting serving to maintain an authentic feel, its a shame to say that in this case, especially when the stakes are raised, the efforts fall between daytime soap opera and late '70s video nasty. The crux of the hamminess comes in the form of one of the exorcists staring straight faced at the camera and comparing himself to Superman (this actually happens).

Ultimately, all of the woes, underachieving shocks and could-have-beens are left at the back of the mind when it comes to The Devil Inside's ending. In short, there isn't one. Without giving too much away, what there actually is is a build up to the third act, that extra thirty minutes missing from the film's running time, and then the credits roll. Just as the film threatens to get interesting, with a genuinely game changing plot development the audience is quite literally told to leave it there. This may be a meagre attempt to one-up the abrupt endings of previous horrors, but it falls tragically short. The Devil Inside does little for the rather small genre of possession movies, does nothing for the horror genre and if anything damages the already waning mocumentary genre.

Avoid paying full ticket price for two thirds of a movie.

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