Taking A Peek At THE DEVIL INSIDE

Victims of undiagnosed mental illness or possessed by otherworldly evil? It’s the central question of any exorcism film, dating back to the grand daddy of them all with 1973s The Exorcist. The latest scare film to tackle this conceit is the mockudrama The Devil Inside. Hoping to further cash in on the on the low cost, high returns formula established by the Paranormal Activity series, Paramount has released this film under their Insurge imprint. While it provides chilling atmosphere and moments of gut churning terror, it fails to deliver a payoff and leaves too many plot points dangling to be considered a full success

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Devil Inside begins with a 9-1-1 call and a walk through the aftermath of a crime scene that has let three members of the clergy dead. After being found not guilty by reason of insanity Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) is transported to a mental institute in Rome, where she has been kept under observation for two decades.

Her daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) discovers her mother committed the murders during an attempt to purge her during an exorcism. Worried that her mother’s mental illness may be passed down and hoping to discover whether her mother’s problem lay in the realm of science or religion, Isabella brings her filmmaker friend Michael with her to Italy to see her mother and visit a Vatican school that specializes in the subject matter. Once there she meets a pair of priests Ben and David (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) that have been conducting exorcisms in secrecy. They invite her to accompany them, telling her she’ll learn more with them in five minutes than a semester’s worth of school.

The Devil Inside is another in the growing line of shot on the cheap verite style of film making. This one has more in common with the documentary trappings of Lake Mungo as it utilizes multiple cameras, interviews and confessional-type footage to put together a more cohesive narrative. While the handheld camera work can be a bit jolting, overall the effect doesn’t pull you out of the film and is well utilized.

The more disturbing bits of The Devil Inside play out like your favorite alt rock song from the early nineties-where there’s an eerie silence that builds to the point of bursting until there’s a cacophony of noisy feedback and pandemonium. The camera gets right up in the mugs of the afflicted, exposing reddened and dilated eyes, pock marked skin and dried out lips. The “muscle relaxant” scene on its own justifies the price of admission (yes it’s a concept lifted wholly from The Last Exorcism but Bell puts added gruesome emphasis on Rosa’s twisted deformity). At the peak of these uncomfortable moments, just before you’re compelled to avert your eyes, events go haywire. The exorcism scenes may play out like a Greatest Hits from similar films: speaking in tongues, blasphemous invitations to cram certain objects into certain bodily orifices, the contortions and levitations and the power of Christ compelling and whatnot; but there’s no denying the implied “reality” from the documentary angle heightens the tension. Crowley gives a magnetic performance as the afflicted mother. Her reunion scene with her daughter shifts from heart wrenching to chill inducing to utterly terrifying within moments. Even more so than the moments she’s shouting profanity or causing a ruckus during her attempted exorcism, the times where she’s just staring out at the room around her, whispering nonsense to herself will raise the hair on your forearms.

The film shines when it shifts the focus away from the actual exorcisms and explores the effect these events have on the participants. You see how the intense nature of these events combined with having every moment and reaction captured on film grinds down the group. For Isabella, there’s the shock at her reunion with her mother, along with the heartbreak that nothing of her may be left inside. Compounded with a Church bureaucracy wishing to sweep everything under the rug, the emotional strain takes a heavy toll, leaving her prone to outbursts of anger and snappishness. The documentarian Michael feels both his skeptic worldview and film slipping out from under him and is almost in a daze as to how to proceed. The rebellious Ben wants to press on regardless of the Church’s blessing or not.

However the person most impacted by what transpires during Rosa’s and Maria’s rituals is the skittish David.  The cracks in is surface become chasms as the specter of Church disapproval, removal from his position and even Excommunication loom over his head. He grows distant from the group, paranoid, sweaty and disillusioned. Events come to a head at a baptism with near tragic results. The film leaves it open as to whether or not David has simply cracked from the stress or fallen host to something far more sinister. Watching him makes you uncomfortable as you can't tell if he's a danger only to himself or everyone in his vicinity. 

However, there’s one massive, 800 pound dick swinging gorilla of a flaw to be had and it’s the infuriating abruptness of the ending. Even by the standards set forth by the found footage genre this one comes out of left field and left an audience that had been captivated by the movie to that point booing and shouting profanity at the screen. I haven’t seen a theater so pissed off at an ending since The Last Exorcism, and at least that ending could be justified after further review. To put it another way, if the film had digitally reinserted footage of Michael Hutchence warning the cast through song that “every single one of us” have the devil inside, culminating in GLEE inspired sing-off to rid the hosts of unclean spirits I would have been less insulted than this needle being scratched over the grooves of an album unexpected end.   It’s like William Brent Bell discovered he was down to his last bit of reel and had to wrap things up despite other intentions. A great big BOO-URNS to the steaming  three pump chump pile of laziness they call an ending.

It’s too bad it crashes and burns in spectacular fashion because save for those last five minutes, The Devil Inside is a damned fine film. It’s perhaps the first exorcism themed film where the child is attempting to protect the parent. It also explores the effects of the process on those other than the afflicted, and doesn’t lean too heavily either camp of science versus faith. Unfortunately for Mr. William Brent Bell, part of the job is to stick the landing, but to my chagrin, he doesn’t come close. When the film cuts to black, directing the audience towards a website for more information on the ongoing “Rossi Investigation”, my thoughts were people will indeed to the web to talk about this movie, but the folks involved are going to hate what they read.