The film begins with the voice over of a security guard explaining a story his mother used to tell him about how the Devil roams the earth and sometimes will gather a group of damned individuals and torture then kill them before claiming their souls. That’s exactly what we have in store throughout the film, but we also have the involvement of a Philadelphia detective who has endured hell himself with the death of his family, and the man responsible never brought to justice. The detective tracks a suicide to a building that just so happens to be the setting where five unlucky souls are trapped in an elevator. He desperately searches for a way to free them from the tight quarters while also trying to solve who is picking them off one by one in the elevator each time the lights go out. What he didn’t count on was that the Devil himself could very well be carrying out his sinister deeds, and that everything does indeed happen for a reason.
The success of the film hinges on our ability to accept the silliness of the course of events. Not to say that the gravity of the situation is silly, but honestly when you see the situation and introduce the idea that the Devil is actually in an elevator torturing the people, it sounds ludicrous. The film even picks up on that and plays with it in a humorous way, and lets us have fun with the ideas. However, the key concept that will draw everyone to the film to see it is who ends up being the Devil. We also get the detective chasing his tail trying to solve what he thinks is an everyday murder, which is how we find out why everyone is there in the elevator as meat for the Devil’s picking, but the mystery of who it is, is going to be what brings in the audience, and sadly once that’s out of the way and the credits roll, DEVIL will be a film very few people feel compelled to revisit.
The performances are all decent enough for a film such as this. Everyone gets their fair share of screen time, but some more than others. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, all I’ll say about the people in the elevator is that they all do a good job of playing spooked, about being in a closed in space with people dying around them, but obviously as the bodies start piling up some are going to get more screen time than the others, so picking out specifics could start sneaking into spoiler territory. The detective played by Chris Messina is given quite a bit to do here, going from confident crime fighter, mourning family man and fighting his drinking problem as a result of losing his family and he pulls them all off pretty well.
For a film that deals with the Devil, the closed in confines of an elevator filled with five people, and dark corridors, I was disappointed that the film is very light in the scare factor. In fact one of the trailers before the film elicited a bigger scare factor for a particular gentleman than anything found in DEVIL. More than once it tries to employ a jump scare, but it succeeds more with the dark spaces characters explore than more genuine sequences that it seems obvious they are trying to scare you. It focuses a lot more on the characters, giving you clues little by little as you try to solve the mystery, which ultimately makes the film more of a thriller than a full fledged horror movie.
Now on to the key piece of the film’s puzzle, who is the Devil? Well I’m not going to drop down such a blatant spoiler, because that’s what gives the film most of its entertainment value. I will say that with the way each character is presented solving that mystery should prove pretty taxing, because I’ll admit up until the very second it’s revealed I had no clue. It gives you a couple brief seconds to let a piece of info sink in right before the black eyes of the Devil hit the screen, and savor it because it doesn’t last near as long or as satisfying as you’d like it to be. I also want to express my disappointment in a sequence that the film seemed to be setting up a little passed the halfway point that it never followed through with. It’s set up in such a way that I was saying to myself that this could be something that turns me around on liking the film rather than just being ok with its existence, but it was not to be.
M. Night Shyamalan’s unmistakable fingerprints are evident in various stages of the film, but more so in the twists and turns. He stays away from the director’s chair here and I believe the film is better because of it. With the way the events of the film turn out, if the film does well at the box office we could have ourselves a whole new franchise that would hit sequel numbers that’ll make SAW blush. If the film had more scares and material outside of the big mystery it could have more reasons to recommend it. DEVIL is an entertaining elevator ride but overall it just isn’t quite evil enough.
