Tell me a story

If you think that the ending to a movie matters, The Devil Inside may not be for you. Sure the film ends, but I’d hesitate to say it has an ending, which is truly a shame because up to the very end I’d been enjoying a decent horror film. At its best the movie hits the mark with a handful of genuinely creepy scenes, particularly the scene set in the insane asylum, where mother and daughter meet for the first time after a lifetime of estrangement.

The mother is Maria Rossi, played with eerie perfection by Suzan Crowley. The daughter is Isabella Rossi, played by Fernanda Andrade. When Isabella was a young child, her mother was arrested and sent to an insane asylum for murdering three of her church members in her home. Isabella discovers that the murders took place during an exorcism that was being performed on her mother. For reasons that are sort of explained in the movie but still unclear to me, Maria is transferred from an asylum in America to one in Rome, yet the Vatican does not acknowledge nor admit that she is possessed. Isabella decides to finally find her mother and speak with her and also make a documentary about the experience. The documentary footage is all that we see in this found footage film.

This documentary style of storytelling is becoming pretty common in the horror genre now. Just a year ago The Last Exorcism tackled the subject of demonic possession and exorcisms in a documentary film style, (to much better effect I might add). Yet I get the appeal of and still enjoy this filmmaking style for horror movies. It adds an air of verisimilitude to the film. When done well it can make you forget you’re watching actors. They’re not characters; they’re real people in genuinely scary situations. You identify faster with them for that reason. You care about them and their fates more easily. And when the person holding the camera has to run for his life and the camera bounces around unfocused, panicked, that frantic energy translates to the audience, even if it does make the images on the screen nauseating to watch. The Devil Inside thankfully employs a device that the Paranormal Activity films used which is steady-mounted cameras, so we’re not constantly bouncing around for the entire film. (The shaky cam is the only reason I haven’t watched Cloverfield a second time, even though I loved the movie.)

But here’s a problem with the documentary style of this film—and it’s a problem most documentary-styled horror films have to deal with—what happens to the film if something happens to the camera man? The ads for The Devil Inside say that it was based on true events. I don’t know to what degree that is true. Maybe all this did happen, and maybe the documentary and Isabella’s investigation ended as abruptly in real life as it did in the film, but there’s no reason the film has to mirror reality, especially when it comes at the cost of the story’s resolution. The sudden ending to The Blair Witch Project left me in chills. This ending just left me cold.

It’s not just the ending that’s a problem. The movie was already starting to unravel a bit in the last 10 to 15 minutes. Characters started to fight with each other for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Facts were brought up about characters, facts you would think were relevant because they were brought up in the first place, but I couldn’t figure out their significance. There are a few “what was the point of that?” moments in the film, and I don’t think I give anything away by saying that the nun in the commercial—you know the one I’m talking about, the creepy one with the cataracts—serves no purpose in the film. It’s literally just a panning shot; she never shows up again. Why? What was the point? I don’t know.

All said, I can’t recommend people spend their money to see this. It’s a thin movie built around a few very creepy moments. Wait for it on cable and then watch it with the lights out. You might have a good time.

That’s the end of the review. What follows is a personal request—no, a plea to all filmmakers:

Please do not put a link to your website at the end of your movie, directing people to go there if they want to learn more, particularly if you don’t have a great ending, particularly if the site just looks like an ad for the movie. If people want to learn more about the purportedly true events in your movie, they’ll look it up themselves.

The Devil Inside
Director: William Brent Bell (Stay Alive)
Screenplay: William Brent Bell, Matthew Peterman (Stay Alive)