DEVIL Movie Review
It isn't news to anyone that M. Night Shyamalan hasn't made a decent horror movie in a very long time. The last two movies he directed, especially The Happening, Lady in the Water, were abysmally bad. It seems like after The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable, even The Village, Shyamalan just lost his touch. His focus on twist endings and feeble attempts at making his own watermark on his movies made his movies slow and even boring at times.
His latest film, "Devil", takes place in an elevator. Five people are trapped together when an elevator in a skyscraper stops on its way up. What at first seems like a technical problem soon becomes a mystery. The elevator becomes inaccessible by any outside help. As two security personnel look on, trying to figure out the issue, they witness a murder within the elevator after the lights temporarily short out. Panicked, the trapped passengers slowly turn on each other, as one by one they are killed off in the tiny space. Nobody is aware of who the killer is because he or she waits until the lights go out. The security guards call the police, and the call is answered by a detective, who happens to be investigating a suicide that took place in the very same building that day. He joins the security guards and watches as the passengers become more and more hostile. One of the more religious security guards concludes that the devil is among the passengers and that he is taking their souls one by one. The detective, outraged, explains how his wife and child were killed in a car accident 5 years earlier, and that the culprit ran away, never being caught. He says that the devil isn't necessary, and that mankind is capable of evil without him.
As the story continues, it comes down to the last two passengers, and the lights go out. One is fatally wounded, and it is then that the devil reveals himself. The last remaining passenger is finally revealed as being the man who killed the detective's wife and child. Repentant, he begs the devil to take him in the place of the dying passenger. He also confesses his crime over a walkie talkie to the detective, not knowing that the detective was the husband of the victims. Feeling the sincerity of the passenger, the devil is unable to take his life, and disappears. The story ends with the detective forgiving the surviving passenger for killing his family, and takes him to jail.
If there's one thing that's refreshing, it's that Shyamalan is finally back into his old style of suspenseful horror. Suspense is one of the few traits that he is most effective at, finding a situation that would make you incredibly anxious and amplifying it (ie: having the lights out in a very confined space with a killer). So that's the one redeeming aspect of this film. Unfortunately though, he continues to have delusions of grandeur, imitating a Hitchcock-esque score that beats you over the head with its obvious telegraphing. I don't know about you, but I don't appreciate a movie's music screaming "BE SCARED!!! BE SCARED!!" over and over and over again at me. The movie also continues to try and stamp Shyamalan's trademark directorial tricks all over the film - like his predictable twist ending. I've come to expect this from his movies, and was looking for it near the end of the film, so that in itself made the ending anti-climactic. That and the fact that, like all his latest crappy films, he tries to base his movies in fantasy. He was better when he was grounding the supernatural world of horror in reality. Yes, the Sixth Sense was about ghosts, but it felt like the real world because he pulled back the spookiness of the ghosts so that you only got eerie glimpses of them. Now he just bashes your head in with all these really gory movies that fail to produce any real terror.
Shyamalan's latest installment is perhaps his closest return to form yet, but still a sub par movie. I've gotten past the point where I can tell if it's actually decent, or if my expectations for his movies have gotten so low that anything seems good.
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