BSA204 W11 : Devil (2010) Review

So I am doing a study on M. Night Shyamalan for Screen Arts, instead of watching any of his directorial efforts that I haven't seen (like his first two films), I instead decided to watch the first of the "Night Chronicles": Devil.

There were supposed to be three of these M. Night led Twilight Zone type movies, where the story is his brainchild but the writing and direction is handed over to someone else, with him mainly taking a producing role, but the first of these was Devil, so that didn't happen. This is a good idea I think, his movies already feel like the feature length episodes of the anthology series so this is a natural progression, especially since he was gravitating more towards higher budget Hollywood productions at the time like The Last Airbender. The second was supposed to be a 12 Angry Men type film with a supernatural twist and the third would have been a movie based on unused material leftover from Unbreakable - which we now know later became Split.

Both the hollywood attempts and the small twilight zone spin-offs would fail of course, but it's always interesting to see the seed of something that never got to grow. The opening titles in Devil for example, where it proudly proclaims The Night Chronicles: 1.

Devil is a movie which sees five strangers stuck in an elevator and the Devil himself is mysteriously amongst them.



It's a captivating premise that makes you intrigued to see the film, but I feel its greatest downfall lies in the narration provided. The story is based on a folk tale that doesn't exist and because the audience can't draw from any prior knowledge the writer has decided to make one of the characters narrate the entire story, remembering the old wives tale his grandmother used to tell him. The problem with this is that everything fits exactly as the story in the story goes and just feels too clean. It feels unfair, rules are made up as the story progresses and the writer has full control of what can or can't happen at any moment. It would have been better to tell the story complete first thing and have the movie unfold then, letting the audience make the connections and leaving space for some narrative freedom. As it is something is said about the wives tale and then it immediately happens in the present tense. It's very unsatisfying to watch and feels like it is spoiling all the best bits before they happen.

When the story does take a different turn than the fake fable it feels like you're being cheated. We are told all the characters in the fable always dies, then one survives. Not only is it breaking rules, but we also disconnect instantly once we find out no one is able to survive the ordeal.

The movie just didn't add up in the end and a lot of that is just because of the fable element at play, it feels a lot like Lady in the Water actually. It leaves the audience with more questions than it answers and the redemption arc feels unearned.

The movie relies on each character in the elevator being the possible Devil, but because of this no one gets any development and we can't sympathise with any of them. The casting was good, probably the best part of the film - to be fair I kinda liked the score by Fernando Velázquez and the opening titles were at the very least creative.

The most interesting thing that it does is have more storylines outside of the main action in the elevator, this stuff is different than what ones expectations for a contained thriller, but I don't think it is made much use of - mainly just there to provide exposition. I think the movie would have been better and more focused if the story was told from less perspectives, either just within the elevator or just from the people looking in.

Shyamalan himself has said that smaller budgets force him to make better movies, and I think this one definitely had way too high of a budget. If this was some small Danish production it would have been set entirely in the elevator and I guarantee it would have made for a much tighter and well made film.

The best narrative decisions that the movie makes is 1) having the characters in the elevator not able to communicate with the outside world (it manages better the stream of information and writing is always effective when some characters know less than others) and 2) the detective scene where he finds the bread truck (its a good bit of detective work that makes enough sense that as an audience member you buy it and think the detective is quite intelligent, it would have been better without us seeing the truck roll off but oh well the seeds for a good scene are there).

The worst part of the movie was the introduction of the detective in the diner, with some of the most awful dialogue I have heard in quite a long while, a bad sign since its a character based movie in a contained location. To say the least this did not instill confidence, aside from the bread truck scene the detectives' scenes are generally quite on-the-nose and horrid:



Contained thrillers have a tendency to deflate and become worse as the movie goes along, by the end it can often feel unfocused and yuck. I think its because the simple premise if perfect for the start, the film is sharp and has a good goal, its only that if it decides to deliver on what the audience expects it becomes not only difficult to execute in an exciting and entertaining manner but also very predictable, leaving the viewers counting down the time left until the end - I think this is what Devil suffers from. Others try to subvert expectations in which case you often feel cheated or things become too muddy - in some instances Devil also applies to this. It's crazy it could manage both, but there you go, of all the contained thrillers I've covered recently, this one is by far the worst.

I think The Guilty was great because it perfectly managed to walk this line, it delivered on what's promised but also subverted expectations by turning the characters' very strong set of morals on its head. It was the same destination as it intended and as the audience expected, but up to that point the reason for why we ended up there was completely flipped. I think some of Shyamalan's other films do the same thing, Sixth Sense for example, there is only really one goal that Bruce Willis' character has at the start and by the end he achieves that, its only at the end that we realise that the meaning of achieving that goal is completely different than what we had originally imagined.

A contained thriller has to deliver on what it promises, this is why Buried was so unsatisfying, but to be successful it has to still subvert the audiences' expectation. It's a tricky one to navigate.