Movie Review - The Devil Inside

Have you seen The Last Exorcism? The Exorcist? Any shaky-cam faux documentary? I can save you money, perhaps more assuredly than Geico, by telling you that if you've seen the aforementioned films, you've already seen The Devil Inside. And I could legitimately leave this review at that, continue on with my day, and feel content knowing that I've given you all the details necessary to help you decide if its worth spending the $7, $8, or even $9 to see this movie when you could turn around and see The Muppets instead.

But that's just not who I am. I have a need to talk about things like The Devil Inside, to express my opinions even when half of the movie theater around me walked out with their terse expressions of, "Well, that sucked," "Gay!", or even the trite "I want my money back" (no hyperbole included here - my favorite was from an old man who quipped, "Even for a documentary that sucked"). Because, yes, while the legion of eleven-year-old children were mostly spot-on with their quick remarks, The Devil Inside still had some redeeming qualities - although not enough to save it from all the hellish reviews its received.

You know that phrase "the devil is in the details"? The Devil Inside never learned it. Because the film is a faux documentary, there's a lot of preparation involved in setting up the realism of a documentary - showing the filmmaker, why he's working with the subjects in the first place, and capturing that grainy quality that all low-budget docs have. But The Devil Inside tries to capture so much of that realism that it ends up squandering most of its runtime on silly scenes involving our protagonist, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), traveling around Italy, trying to decipher how she can get her mother an exorcism without going against the Vatican.

Unfortunately, these scenes all seem to occur between the only scary scenes in the film - and it slows the pace of an already slow film down to nothing. A fake documentary should be anything but as boring as real documentaries are, and yet The Devil Inside can't seem to balance a mix of fake "real" B-roll with the actual point of why a horror fan might watch the film.

It doesn't help that the movie is damned with a sense of melodrama, from the way the doctors keeping Isabella's mother look at the camera to the absolutely dreadful acting from Ionut Grama as Michael the filmmaker - who, thank the devil, stays off the screen for most of the film. It's difficult to take things seriously when the professional exorcists are panting like the underworld's hounds in heat, when The Devil Inside steals almost entire lines from previous films, or when much of what the film finds scary is a woman with frizzy hair leaning into the camera and letting out a loud, tremulous screech.

There are some tense moments thanks to director William Brent Bell's smart idea to leave music out of the film. The silence is palpable, especially in a scene where an exorcism takes place in a dark basement and expectations are running wild. But the devil's game is off - none of these moments work because their execution is exactly the same as any other exorcism movie you've seen, complete with odd body contortions, stigmata, and wall-crawling. This isn't the devil in disguise, it's a carnival! It's too bad the theater didn't provide cotton candy.

I'm sure, though, that the loudest cries of outrage for the film came because of the ending. To save whatever surprise the film has, I'll simply say that the end is anticlimactic, and I'm being generous here. I think we all could have been appeased with the fact that The Devil Inside was fairly derivative if it at least had a decent ending. But it doesn't, and I don't blame this so much on the filmmakers as I do the entire genre of faux documentaries. My biggest problem is the fact that someone must compile the footage for our viewing, and there's no good way to get rid of the filmmaker while maintaining the realism of the documentary. With that said, the end of The Devil Inside makes Nic Cage's Season of the Witch look like an Oscar contender.

What you're left with at best is a complete ripoff of the genre, stripped down to bare bones and simplified for scaring young children and the half-blind, mostly deaf elderly. There would be an outrage if someone proposed a remake of The Last Exorcism only a year after it was released, right? Now imagine if that remake was marketed as a completely new film. Voila! The Devil Inside, served on a platter with deviled eggs.

Please take my survey.

The Devil Inside on Rotten Tomatoes