“Devil” is the first in a projected series of movies from the diminishing-returns mind of M. Night Shyamalan under his dubiously named The Night Chronicles production shingle. Shyamalan came up with the story, about a series of strangers trapped on a malfunctioning elevator with (dum dum DUMMMM) the Devil and also produced the movie, but didn’t have anything to do with its writing and directing (depending on your feelings on Shyamalan, this can be seen as either a very good thing or a very bad thing.)
Even without his overt involvement the movie features several trademarks of the Shyamalan oeuvre: there’s a very religious supporting character with daft spiritual notions who everyone, even the most rational characters, go to for advice and who drives the basic plot momentum (much of the movie is based on a story this character, whose name is barely mentioned, was told by his grandmother); there are long, swirly camera moves; there’s a labored insistence on fate and destiny; and, of course, there’s a forehead-smacking twist ending followed by a story note so drab and anticlimactic that should have been cut altogether, but probably couldn’t be removed because the movie’s already so comically brief. All that said, there are some minor pleasures to be gotten out of the film, even if you forget about it completely before you finish the drive home from the theater.
On its most base level, “Devil” does sport a nifty concept, and if the movie had just been whittled down a little more it would have made for a hum-dinger of an episode of “M. Night Shyamalan Presents” but as a feature-length movie it strains that concept and splinters it into a thousand subplots, all of them ultimately meaningless.
Inside the elevator, we have your typically shifty hodgepodge of characters that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1970s disaster movie. There’s a corrupt mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend), a bitchy heiress (Bojana Novakovic), an ex-con security guard (Bokeem Woodbine), a little old lady (Jenny O’Hara) and a shifty loner (Logan Marshall-Green), who you can tell is a shifty loner because he wears a hoodie and has a girlfriend with neck tattoos. Outside the elevator there’s a damaged cop (Chris Messina) trying to piece everything together, along with various security guards (among them, the sturdily reliable Matt Craven), firemen, etc. It’s in this flat, don’t-really-recognize-anybody casting that the filmmakers seemed to be going for a sense of unpredictability – that since you don’t know any of these actors, any of them could go at any time. And while this does lend something to its decidedly Agatha Christie-ish conceit, with the lights in the elevator (and the theater) periodically going out and someone getting offed, it does affect the movie’s overall quality. Without cheap, effective character actors in the roles, the movie becomes even blander.
“Devil” was written by Brian Nelson (who wrote the overrated indie sensation “Hard Candy” and co-wrote vampires-in-Alaska epic “30 Days of Night”) and was directed by John Erick Dowdle, who was responsible for 2008’s enthusiastic but underwhelming “[rec]” remake “Quarantine.” The filmmakers do everything they can to keep the movie sprightly and moving, juxtaposing the high energy human drama of what’s going on inside the elevator with the more metaphysical predicaments of those outside, but nothing really ends up making much sense. For instance, the movie opens with a man committing suicide (in the movie’s internal logic this is the devil’s entry point to our earthly plane), and while there is an investigation into this, it’s never really explained or even puzzled out. It’s just one of a myriad of subplots that not only doesn’t add up to anything, but ends up taking away from the goose-fleshy fun of other parts of the movie.
Also taking away from the fun is the reflexive editorial rhythm that the movie gets into. Call it the anti-“Final Destination”: anytime somebody gets killed, we cut away, usually in a “clever” suggestive way, but one that infuriates nonetheless. These cutaways aren’t merely confined to the “spooky things happening in the darkened elevator” sections of the movie but other, well-lit scenes outside of the elevator: stuff like a mechanic falling down the elevator shaft or somebody getting electrocuted. It’s in decisions like these that the film’s biggest failing pops up: it can’t decide whether it wants to be some kind of high-brow exercise exploring faith and the supernatural, or a clearly B-grade thriller involving people trapped in an elevator with the Devil.
Still, for all its faults there are some good things on offer. The movie was shot by Tak Fujimoto, who shot “Silence of the Lambs” and “Badlands” and lends the movie a sleek sense of grandeur and scope not afforded to it anywhere else in the production. And his involvement is no surprise given that he previously lensed Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” “Signs” and “The Happening.” Additionally, Fernando Valazquez, who scored the moody Spanish melodrama “The Orphanage,” does a robustly Bernard Herrmann-y job with the music. But these are pretty small joys in the grand scale of things, and ones that are obviously only appreciated by those inclined to be dazzled by such things (like this writer). Then again, the devil is in the details. [C]