Shot on what appears to be a micro-budget, The Devil Inside chronicles the story of a young woman who seeks to find out why her mother killed three priests twenty years before.
Ever since The Blair Witch Project was shot for under ten thousand dollars and made more than a hundred million, there have been a lot of ‘found footage’ movies that have tried to duplicate that result – to varying degrees of success [but mostly failure – with the exception of the Paranormal Activity series which is in danger of wearing out its welcome with a fourth film already scheduled].
The Devil Inside is one of those failures.
The film opens with a 911 call in the mode of what we can see on TV newscasts from time to time – a blank screen with a woman’s words produced in white as the call progresses [like we couldn’t understand her even though she’s speaking clearly!]. A woman informs the operator – in a cold, flat voice – that ‘I killed them all’ and to send the police.
This is followed by a grainy video of the police videotaping the scene as they inspect it – describing the victims and likely methods of the deaths – and then they hear something and follow the sounds to a crawlspace.
Twenty years later, Isabella Rossi [Fernanda Andrade] is on a mission to find out what happened to her mother, Maria [Suzan Crowley] – the woman who made the 911 call. The three men Maria murdered were priests, so the possibility exists that she was the subject of an exorcism at the time and Isabella is accompanied by a documentary filmmaker, Michael [Ionut Grama] because of the unusual circumstances [really, the subject would definitely make a great film – this, however, is not it].
Isabella journeys to Rome – Maria was transferred to a Roman hospital shortly after she was found not guilty of the priests’ murders by reason of insanity – and does a little research on exorcism before visiting her mother. By research, I mean she takes in the tail end of a class on differentiating demonic possession from mental illness – which gives her [and us] all the information she really needs for the rest of the film [funny how that works].
There she also meets two priests, David [Evan Helmuth] and Ben [Simon Quarterman], who have been performing exorcisms without the church’s sanction [the church, it seems, no longer ‘officially’ recognizes possession – or sanctions exorcisms]. The priests convince her to accompany them to one such unsanctioned exorcism, saying that she’ll never know what a real possession is like if she doesn’t witness one.
This one is held in a basement. Cue the ominous music. Well, don’t, because this is supposed to be raw documentary footage, don’tcha know, so, no score.
All of this leads up to Isabella’s visit with her mother – who knows something she couldn’t possibly know! Wow! A sign of possession, much? And from there, The Devil Inside devolves rapidly into a series of clichés and falls completely apart [not that it was particularly riveting earlier].
The cast of The Devil Inside gets full marks for doing what they could with the material, but it’s just too much for them. Seriously, the script, by director William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterman, has a few good ideas but Bell has no idea what to do with them – so he goes for the ham-fisted shakycam approach [practically guaranteed to generate nausea or migraines in a significant portion of any audience].
Bell also has a problem with pacing. Except for the brief moments when a possessed person is going nuts, the film moves at the next best thing to full stop. It makes an under ninety-minute film feel way too long [the film is credited as being eighty-seven minutes in length, but almost ten of that is the glacially-paced end credit roll].
I can’t say I’ve ever felt this way before, but I was proud of the audience at the screening I attended – they laughed at exactly all the wrong moments. It’s too bad that Mystery Science Theater 3000 isn’t still around – what fun they could have had with this one.
Final Grade: D
Photo by Toni Salabasev/courtesy Paramount Pictures.