Review by Neil Davey
Stars Chris Messina, Logan Marshall Green, Jenny O'Hara, Bokeem Woodbine, Bojana Novakovic,
Geoffrey Arend, Matt Craven, Jacob Vargas, Jenny O'Hara | Written by Brian Nelson & M Night Shyamalan
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £24.99 | BD Region B | Runtime 81 minutes | Directed by John Erick Dowdle
The sheep-like assassination of M Night Shyamalan is a funny one. Why do critics hate him so? There seems to be a certain amount of "teaching him a lesson" going on as far as my colleagues in this industry are concerned, presumably because Shyamalan had the audacity to start his career with The Sixth Sense, a genuine modern classic.
Since then, it's been fashionable to take potshots at the bloke for his vanity cameo appearances, his love of a twist, his fantasy tales, etc. Bizarrely, this has extended in recent years to attacking his directorial skills. By all means hate his films and stories but surely you have to admit that the guy can direct? Over the last couple of weeks, I've rewatched Signs, Unbreakable and The Village and they're incredibly well crafted, and near masterpieces of creeping terror and tension.
Take Lady In The Water for example. I sat in a preview screening surrounded by critics from assorted magazines and papers and websites. I looked around at one point and you could have heard a pin drop. The entire cinema appeared utterly captivated and swept up by the (admittedly odd) modern fairytale. Flash forward two weeks, and the same critics (including the two I saw wiping away a tear) were cheerily announcing it was a steaming great pile of ploppies: the lying, sheep-like bastards.
Just to undermine my argument, of course, The Last Airbender was terrible but it's also the film where Shyamalan has had the least input into the story. Devil is the exact opposite: the story is his, the rest of the film isn't. The screenplay is by Brian Nelson, who wrote Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night. The director is Quarantine-helmer John Erick Dowdle. That meant Shyamalan was, once again, on a hiding to nothing. If the film sucked, well, it was Shyamalan, what do you expect? And if it's any good, well, that's because of Dowdle and Nelson.
Anyway, Devil's out now, and it's 80 minutes of very solid, frequently scary, genuinely creepy goings-on. The tagline is essentially the plot: there are five people trapped in a lift, one is not who they seem to be. And quite who they are can probably be deduced from the title. Unlike the hilariously awful Buried, Devil takes its (sort of) confined location and actually does something of note with it. Smartly, it's neatly fleshed out by other sinister goings on within the building and the police attempts (led by Messina's detective) to get to the bottom of it all, but it's mostly in the elevator itself that the terror builds in a highly efficient, edge-of-seat manner.
Performances are as good as they need to be, the gore is mostly implied and Dowdle and Nelson WILL make you jump: They got me twice, and that rarely happens after 16 years of doing this. A horror classic? No. A well paced supernatural thriller? Most definitely.
EXTRAS ★★ Considering that this is a Blu-ray disc, the special features are not really all that special: three deleted scenes; The Story featurette (2:32); The Devil's meeting featurette (2:26); The Night Chronicles featurette (2:15). And that's about it, apart form the usual Blu-ray features such as BD Live, D-Box and the My Scenes bookmarking ability.