Devil. Rated M (horror themes and violence). 81 minutes. Directed by John Erick Dowdle. Screenplay by Brian Nelson based on a story by M. Night Shyamalan.
Film distributors, it would seem, have decided that it’s the season to scare us out of our wits – and while watching concrete crack would be preferable to revisiting some of the latest attempts – M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil, on the other hand, delivers relentless nail-biting suspense that had me peeking at the cinema screen through the gaps between my fingers a great deal of the time.
Also known as The Night Chronicles: Devil, this is the first of M. Night Shyamalan’s (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, The Last Airbender) planned Night Chronicles trilogy that will explore the existence of supernatural forces in the lives of people going about their (on the surface, anyway) day-to-day existence.
While Detective Bowden (Chris Messina) is investigating the death of a man who has fallen through the window of a skyscraper, five people find themselves trapped in one of the building’s elevators. At first, the plight of Ben (Bokeem Woodbine), an elderly woman (Jenny O'Hara), Vince (Geoffrey Arend), Tony (Logan Marshall-Green) and Sarah (Bojana Novakovic) appears to be nothing more than the result of a random elevator glitch – but before too long, events take a serious turn for the worse. Much worse.
Shyamalan’s Grand Guignol-inspired story, with generous lashings of a good, old-fashioned fright-fest, is fashioned into an extravagant (yet potently efficient) screenplay by Mr Nelson (Hard Candy). Dowdle’s (Quarantine) direction, Tak Fujimoto’s (Silence of The Lambs) cinematography and Elliot Greenberg’s (Quarantine) editing, account for the material masterfully, while the entire cast embrace every possibility to go-for-broke in true horror movie territory.
While, again, the film doesn’t quite deserve its almost quaint ending, horror genre afficionados will find themselves right at home.
This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.
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