Film Review: "Devil"

Title: Devil (2010)
Director: John Erick Dowdle
LB Rating: 1/5

Devil is a half-baked film, relying on its borrowed premise to carry the entire mess.

The film opens with Detective Bowden in therapy, dealing with the death of his wife and son who were hit-and-run five years ago. A suicide later happens nearby, so Bowden started investigating the building where the jumper came from. The suicide was a foreboding of the things to come in the building. Bowden would then be involved in an attempt to save five people trapped in the elevator of the said building. As time goes by, the trapped individuals are mysteriously and brutally killed, one by one. Bowden, believing that one of them is the murderer, tries his best to control the situation. It was later revealed that one of the trapped individuals is responsible for the death of Bowden's family. Bowden surprisingly forgives him. But the individuals die anyway, as one of them was shown to be the devil.

Five people trapped in an elevator and one of them is a murderous devil. Spooky until the engineers fix the elevator. (Image source: usa.newonnetflix.info)

According to storywriter M. Night Shyamalan, Devil is based on Agatha Christie's 1939 novel "And There Was None". The premise of the novel is the devil arranges a secluded and seemingly accidental meeting of several persons who have great sins. In the meeting, the devil kills them one by one. As you can see, the film adopted the exact structure. Sadly, the structure is just about the only cool part of the film. Everything else is mediocre. 

The most nonsensical thing that stuck out to me is Bowden's involvement in the elevator trap incident. You would think that when an elevator breaks, the management would call engineers, mechanics, and anyone who can actually fix the thing. One of the last persons who would get involved is a damn detective. And it's not as if Bowden investigated if there's foul play in the breaking of the elevator. He did not. He just presented himself as if he can get the trapped individuals out.

Sure, the happening of the murders might have justified Bowden's involvement in the elevator problem. Beyond shallow reasoning, how would a detective stop a murderer from killing all the persons trapped with her in an elevator? How can Bowden use all his detective skills, or the profiling of the trapped persons, or his authority as enforcer of law to save all these people? Will his shouting and commanding through a walkie-talkie stop the murderer? I don't think so. 

Maybe he can figure out who the murderer is and then order the other trapped individuals to detain her. But based on the freaky way the murders happen, which is usually during a short black out where no one can see a thing, it would be hard to detain the murderer. If she's capable of slashing a person's throat off in a couple of seconds, during the dark, then that murderer's superhuman and beyond detention.

Ultimately, he is powerless in that situation. I believe that his priority should have been to get the elevator fixed. 

What were you planning on doing, Bowden? How would you get them out of the broken elevator? (Image source: thewallpapers.org)

Fine. A team of engineers and mechanics would later come into the film to break the people out of the elevator. Instead of fixing the elevator they decided to make a hole in a thick-ass wall to get them out. Nice strategy, but: they maybe could have focused on fixing the elevator controls in the basement, and boring a hole, for some reason, took them too much time that when they finished, everyone but one is dead. So they were pretty much useless even if they were the only actual solution to the problem.

This logical blunder made the entire film difficult to watch. It doesn't help that Bowden feels like he's the superhero to save the day. He has this arrogance in him that makes me want to tell him to shut up.

Even if I gloss over illogical premise, the film is still bad. The narration by that superstitious guard is irritating, as he's just reading and spoiling the structure of the film with no build up whatsoever. Also, I could not stand how the trapped individuals absolutely hate each other to death for the smallest reasons. At one point the murderer seemed irrelevant--they would kill each other anyway. Moreover, the reveal that the murderer was actually the old lady who was possessed by the devil is a very weak misdirection. The story just assigned her as the murderer because she's old and no one would suspect her to possess superhuman strength.

The white and black guy were bait for racists. The woman was a bait for anti-feminists. The salesman was the easy answer. No one suspected the old woman. So obviously, it was the old woman. (Image source: a-zhorror.com)

Finally, I do not like how the main burden of the film is resolved. Bowden has this problem with moving on from the death of his family. It has been five long years of emptiness, depression and searching. I can understand his grief, and it would be perfectly normal if he does not move on for another five years. What I can also understand is if he flips out when he learns of the identity of the one responsible for his family's death. At the end of the film, Bowden finds out that one of the trapped individuals was the one who killed his family. How did he react?

As in yoga, Bowden took deep breaths and forgave the guy. Ridiculous. Unbelievable. No one would react that way. It's obviously made to redeem Bowden and to put him in a nice moral high ground. But why? The injustice of your family's death should be enough pass for one to act immorally. He could shoot the guy and I would sympathize. But for the sake of Bowden's character as the good guy, the film simply took his humanity from him. That's what ultimately makes this film bad for me.

The film would have been better if Bowden was trapped with the others because at least he would have the power to make choices and prevent the deaths. And they could have been trapped in a larger space so they would have more room for agency and misdirections. And, finally, Bowden should have been given the option: would he, in behalf of the devil, kill the guy who hit-and-run his family, or would he protect the guy from the devil. That would be such a compelling moral dilemma as there appear to be no wrong choices.

I should probably watch this instead. (Image source: acorn.tv)

In the end, I think the film wasted the potential of its structure. The devil's meeting premise sounds like a good structure to play around with. Sadly, everything else sucked.