It’s not often I leave a cinema feeling physically angry at a movie. Usually if I don’t like something I can discuss it with hate or just brush it off entirely as something I’d rather not think about anymore, but rarely does it bubble up such strong negative feelings. The Devil Inside is, in that way, a rare movie experience for me.
This tiresome, contrived and unoriginal horror film takes the term “unsatisfying” to a whole new level. Taking the form of found-footage – a technique that can be utilised well (the Spanish-language REC films and the recent Chronicle to name just a few) but can be horrifically dull when not – the film follows a young woman, Isabella, who travels to visit her mother who has been in a mental hospital in Rome ever since she killed three people during an exorcism 20 years prior. With the help of two priests, one of whom is an ordained exorcist, she aims to find out if her mother is possessed rather than mentally ill.
All that seems eerily familiar and that’s because this type of thing has been done tons of times before and infinitely better. The techniques used to tell the story are beyond familiar but the trouble is the movie seems to think it’s being fresh and up-to-date when it’s far from it. Its already dated style – time stamped found-footage, exorcism scenes involving contorted bodies and demonic noises, etc. – and tiresome story make for a predictable and frankly boring tease of an experience that doesn’t deliver.
Which leads us to the ending, if it can be called that at all. Not to give too much away but needless to say the film builds and builds, the only thing really keeping attention being the intrigue to how it’s all going to turn out, towards what has got to be one of the worst endings in a long time. It could accurately be described as a “non-ending,” an open-ended nothing that feels like the midway point of a much longer film, promising much and ultimately failing to deliver.
Found-footage as a technique isn’t the problem in and of itself with this trend Hollywood has become infatuated with but rather films like this which bring absolutely nothing new to the table and lazily leave things open. Something like The Last Exorcism tried the same sort of thing and while certainly not a perfect film, for what it was it handled the technique well, provided some decent scares and had an ending that was similarly open to interpretation but offered some interesting ideas and questions. The Devil Inside does no such thing.
A pointless, repetitive, increasingly ridiculous film in which any incidental scares are soon forgotten when the monumentally unsatisfying ending smacks you in the face and expects you to be thankful. And I’m anything but.
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