The Devil Inside: Devoid of Scares

The Devil Inside begins with text telling us that the film was not endorsed by the Vatican.  The Vatican, as far as I can tell, has also never endorsed lawn mowers, candy corn or Phil Collins' "Something Happened On the Way to Heaven," but no one has yet rightly batted an eye at those facts.  The text is meant to immediately intrigue the audience by teasing them with the promise that what they're about to see is so provocative that the Pope and his bishops wouldn't touch the film with a 10-foot crucifix.  That may very well be true, but I imagine that if Pope Benedict XVI has actually seen and condemned The Devil Inside, it's for reasons similar to when Warner Bros. executives saw and condemned Catwoman.

You see, the text that opens The Devil Inside is not a signal that what you're about to see is shocking and revelatory, but instead a warning that you're in for roughly 90 minutes of manufactured drama completely devoid of scares.  Director William Brent Bell and his co-writer Matthew Peterman have to tell you that you'll be scared because they certainly don't earn the scares. 

The entire sham begins under the guise of the making of a documentary, a creative and narrative framing that fails from the beginning because of how stiff and unnatural the performances and plot unfold.  Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade) takes a documentary crew – which strangely consists solely of cameraman, Michael (Ionut Grama) – to a psychiatric hospital in the heart of the Vatican to see her mother, Maria (Suzan Crowley).  Maria has been locked away and heavily medicated for two decades because of the slaughter of three church members during an exorcism – an exorcism, I may add, they were performing on her.  Wanting to know whether her mother was legitimately possessed or if a long history of mental illness is in the cards for her, Isabella sits in on an exorcism class because I'm sure the Catholic Church warmly welcomes outsiders being educated on such a hotly debated and controversial topic. 

Isabella is surprised but comforted to hear that the participants in the class are not of one mind on the topic.  A young, assertive Italian priest views the footage of a supposed exorcism as nothing more than proof of a deeply psychotically disturbed woman.  Priests Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth), on the other hand, think it fits all the tell-tale signs of exorcism.  The duo's confidence springs not just from faith, but from a melding of faith-based criteria and scientific analysis of many past cases.

These benevolent yet naive young priests have taken it upon themselves to exorcise those unfortunate few that the Church feels do not fit the criteria of demon possession.  "The Church is not in the business of healing," Ben declares.  Seeing as Maria has been locked away and sedated for 20 years, she is the ideal candidate to be re-evaluated.  Soon enough, however, Ben, David, Isabella and Michael, all of whom bring their own inner demons to what looks to be a tremendous test of faith and dedication, begin to be adversely affected by the multiple demons that appear to be inhabiting Maria. 

If any of this sounds even remotely appealing, then I have severely failed all of you as a film critic.  Admittedly, the aspect of creating a faux exorcism documentary is an intriguing one – it worked very well for The Last Exorcism – but Bell and his actors fail so spectacularly at making any moment of The Devil Inside feel organic that the documentary framing becomes an unintentional joke.  With such stiff performances and an almost complete lack of "gotcha!" moments, the only apparent justification for using the found footage angle was for budgetary considerations.

But it's not just the framing that causes problems.  The Devil Inside is a nightmare of superficial shocks that attempt to cover up a complete lack of mood or atmosphere.  You know that creepy "connect the cuts" muttering that conclude the film's trailer?  The muttering that precedes the reveal of self-inflicted upside down crosses that were deemed signature enough to comprise the film's poster?  There's no significance to that scene whatsoever.  "Oooh, upside down crosses!" we say.  "Perhaps that will feature significantly later in the film," we speculate.  Wrong.  That scene, like the demonic homophobic slurs and vulgar screams, is a mere surface level thrill, a failed attempt at shocking the audience into forgetting that there's no reason to care about anybody.  Bundle this all up with an ending that resolves nothing before prompting you to further "explore" the case online, and The Devil Inside essentially becomes the longest commercial for a viral campaign I've ever seen.