What the Devil?

There’s no arguing with the fact that M. Night Shamalan has had a rough go of it the last few years. I even stuck by him for a while; my love for Signs and The Village (yeah, I liked it, so what?) gave me the courage to stand up to his detractors, knowing that it was still in him to make good movies. Lady in the Water was passable, but only because Paul Giamatti is the coolest man on the planet and I have a strange love for boring, modern-day fairy tales (C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). Then The Happening, well, didn’t, and The Last Airbender was so impossibly bad that I, even I, could no longer keep up the fight.

But it still seemed strange to me that this man with such magnificent ideas could so very quickly lose his rational mind and think that releasing these most recent films would be a good idea. It’s like whatever affliction is corroding George Lucas’s brain has latched onto M. Night full-force. And I’m saddened, just as I’m saddened at every mention or thought of Jar-Jar Binks, that it is so obviously true. This is why I was initially worried about Devil, first part of the Night Chronicles.

There were two things, however, that gave me hope for this movie: It was directed by someone else (John Erick Dowdle, director of 2008’s not-horrible Quarantine) and it was written by someone else (Brian Howard, writer of 2007’s 30 Days of Night adaptation). That’s not a terrible team, right there. Neither of those movies were blockbusters, but they were both entertaining and a little scary. So hopefully, with easily the scariest supernatural enemy any group of humans could face and the twisted mind of M. Night on their side they should be able to concoct a watchable, somewhat scary and at least decently entertaining movie. Wonderfully, that’s exactly what happened.

This movie hits all the main fear-groups: claustrophobia, xenophobia, acrophobia, demonophobia, and for readers of this review, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. They also used my favorite scary-movie tactic, darkness. Instead of showing everything, they leave the really scary parts to our imagination by only allowing us to hear what’s going on. Coupled with all the tight shots (even in relatively open rooms, the shots still tend to be directly on the actor’s faces) this movie makes you feel like you are in the elevator of the damned.

That being said, there were some problems. First, the underlying story was a rehash of Signs with different supernatural baddies and a decided lack of Mel Gibson, no matter how hard our hero (Chris Messina, Julie and Julia) tries to be. And, even worse, the end was totally predictable, and a little anticlimactic. Predicable doesn’t bother me, except in this case it’s a repeat of one of M. Night’s previous stories. Luckily, the point of the whole thing makes up for these two failings, and makes the movie worth watching. On DVD.