THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012) – REVIEW

I remember watching an episode of Yellowstone, that neo-western tv-series with Kevin Costner. TV series usually pass me by, because I passionately prefer movies instead and there’s only so much I can take and got time for. But Yellowstone is something I actively tried not to pass up because I’m a fan of that particular genre and I consider Taylor Sheridan a quality screenwriter. This particular episode contained a lengthy scene involving a group of cowboys playing Hold ‘Em poker in their bunkhouse. There was a lot of bantering going back and forth, expletives flying across the table and verbal frolicking with quick repartees. And I felt like I was sitting in there with them while watching it. It was immersive.

Found footage movies basically work the same way. As with a bunch of cowboys playing a card game, the plot can be simple. Some examples off the top of my head: a group of people going into the woods documenting a local legend, see The Blair Witch Project. A team investigating the disappearance of a farmer’s son, see Skinwalker Ranch. A documentary crew exploring the Parisian Catacombs, see As Above, So Below. A reporter doing a feature on firefighters and gets quarantined, see [REC]. Or just a couple in their home where weird things happen, see Paranormal Activity.

The Devil Inside is also one such movie. Directed and co-written with Matthew Peterman (Stay Alive, Wer) by William Brent Bell (Stay Alive, Wer, The Boy), it follows the fates and fortunes of Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade, NeXt) as she documents and investigates, joined by her cameraman Michael (Ionut Grama), what happened to her mother Maria (Suzan Crowley, Driving Lessons, Wild About Harry). Her mother brutally slaughtered three people 20 years ago, got subsequently declared insane, and is now institutionalized in Rome, nearby the Vatican and an exorcism academy.

Isabella lives in L.A. so off to Rome she goes with Michael, where she attends the academy and meets up with exorcist apprentices Ben Rawlings (Simon Quarterman (Wer, Separation) and David Keane (Evan Helmuth, Ready Or Not, Jobs), who’re clandestine – as in, unratified by the church – exorcists themselves. They agree to let her and Michael tag along to get a deeper understanding of what demonic possession entails, and whether or not Maria is in fact possessed. And I’m not giving anything away that cannot already be deduced from the movie poster by divulging that this eventually turns out to be very much so.

The movie received loads of flak from critics back when it came out. Particularly the abrupt and open ending was maligned and felt deeply unsatisfying. And its writing was generally judged sloppy at best, leaving many gaping inconsistencies throughout the movie. It’s worth noting here that the found footage boom, triggered by Paranormal Activity, was already nosediving by the time it came out. Movie production companies, never shy to make a buck, had flooded the marketplace in their efforts to replicate PA’s commercial success, making found footage movies on a shoestring in hopes it might return their budgets a hundred times over.

The box office was way more forgiving to The Devil Inside, at least in part because Paramount aggressively stylized its marketing strategy after The Blair Witch Project, complete with a designated website documenting the current whereabouts of the purported real-life people behind the movie characters and the ongoing investigation into the whole affair that we’ve seen in the footage. This all looks silly in hindsight and doesn’t inspire much endearment for the movie but commercially, it kind of worked, not in a monetarily explosive BWP kind of way, but still. And Paramount probably doesn’t care either way; they got their money back and made a nice profit, and moved on.

With found footage creeping back into the game, thanks in no small part to social media and video conferencing post-covid, it’s interesting to see how the movie itself and the criticism it was dealt holds up, as I’m writing this more than a decade later. My requirements with these type of movies are simple and singular: be immersive. That means good writing, believable acting, and solid audiovisuals. In other words, get the basics right and you could already be well on your way towards something presentable.

But here’s where found footage’s Achilles heel gets exposed all too often already. People endlessly bickering or calling someone they’re looking for while aimlessly wandering around, like the drama basics of relatable protagonist, character development and arch somehow don’t apply in this format anymore. News flash: they still do. Shaking the camera into a migraine episode to conceal dodgy effects work looks exactly like what it is. Lengthy conversations that are not interesting to begin with, or that are hardly audible because nobody bothered to treat the room are downright irritating. I could go on but the gist is clear, stuff like that annoys me to no end and doesn’t contribute to the genre’s longevity, to put it charitably. And it breaks my heart, because I’m fully aware of all the sacrifices that come with any indie production. I take neither pride not pleasure in smashing any of them but when it’s bad or, even worse, lazy, well, it just is.

But no matter how I looked, The Devil Inside mostly manages to avoid all those trappings and actually turns out to have been, and still is, much better than it probably has any right to be. The atmosphere is consistently foreboding and ominous. Barring a handful of erratic scenes, camerawork is mostly pretty steady and adequately framed, sound is clear and acting is sufficiently relatable. Of particular note is Crowley’s eerie performance as the batshit crazy Maria. She really put herself through the wringer and gets dangerously close to going over the top at times. Regardless, ultimately, the movie isn’t breaking any ground, nor is it even really original, but it’s decently enough done and made.

The movie’s ending is indeed abrupt and understandably controversial. While it still kind of worked for me, I can also see how it can be off-putting. If I were being overly cynical, which I try not to be but just bear with me on this one, I would suspect the producers tacked on the ending to lure people to their website, and to set up a lucrative sequel that, in spite of the profit it made, never came to be.

As for the writing, I really never got disturbed or distracted by any overt inconsistencies. The movie’s antagonist, the titular devil inside if you will, doesn’t play within a clear framework of rules set within the movie, and where it took decades to gestate inside Maria, it has no problem jumping from one to another later on. But I’m not privy to any rules of conduct for devils or demons, I only know how they usually operate in movies. I’m clueless as to what a consistency framework for devils and demons would be like, and so is the film. When watching it, all I know is that exorcists recognize some behavioral signs, and have developed a few methods on how they might be able to expel them. And I’m fine with that premise.

In conclusion, if you like found footage, there are worse ways to waste 90 minutes of your time. It may not be the best there is with its fairly predictable proceedings and abrupt ending, but give it a spin anyway because it’s not nearly as bad as you thought it was.