M.Night Shyamalan tends to be poison to a film. His legacy has completely gone to shit in the past few years, with a string of complete crap like Lady In The Water and The Happening. He is only the producer on his latest project, Devil, and I went in expecting something completely different than what it actually turned out to be.
Devil is the story of five strangers that get stuck in an elevator of a Philadelphia office building. At first, its just an inconvenience for the security guards and the people stuck; but soon after, strange things start happening and people start dying. One of the security guards, Ramirez (Jacob Vargas, who also occasionally narrates) is beginning to believe one of the people aboard the elevator is the Devil himself. As the body count rises, a detective named Bowden (Chris Messina) is brought to the scene, and the events keep getting stranger until the Devil's identity is finally revealed.
Going into Devil, I was expecting an unintentionally hilarious film. What I got was a surprisingly decent horror flick. Even though Shyamalan is only the producer, I thought this film was going to be typical Shyamalan trash, but it's not. Devil works, for the most part, because of the tension between the characters and inherent in the setting. It is has a very real aspect that is missing in most horror flicks. The script also has a couple of nice surprises thrown in it near the end that you won't necessarily see coming. On the downside, however, Devil really isn't very scary. If you are looking for a good scare, you're not going to find it here.
The script is fairly sharp and the story is pretty well thought out. Even though it is only 80 minutes long, the screenwriters are able to focus on the many different angles admirably. Shyamalan might finally be showing some improvement (though he's not completely off the hook yet). Devil is not going to be at the top of my end-of-the-year list, but it is far, far better than I thought it was going to be.
3 / 5 Stars
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