M. Night Shyamalan gets a lot of flak since "The Village". Most people either love or hate his movies. I judge each one on its own individual merits, but sometimes a bit of prejudice creeps in. You start to expect twists. I tend to try and guess them before they happen, knowing they just have to be there. When I went to watch this movie for this review, I had already seen the movie once years ago... which actually worked in my favor, because it had been so long since I'd seen it, I couldn't tell if my guesses were based on what was in
front of me, or a long-forgotten memory of a plot point.
This means I discounted all my own "intuitive" leaps of logic, and just watched the story. As a result, I actually enjoyed it.
Based on an old folk tale called "The Devil's Meeting", Devil is the story of five seeming-strangers who get on the same elevator in a tall high-rise building. A suicide in the building paved the way for the devil to enter, and now he's come to claim some souls. Personally. You would think that one being couldn't get up to any shenanigans in a closed room with a camera on it, but through the use of flickering lights and mysteriously flying cell-phones as flashlights, he manages to do just that.
I would like to point out here that if you suffer from seizures triggered by flickering lights, you'll want to avoid this film.
The movie is appropriately tense for an action thriller, but it seemed to lack a certain supernatural vibe you'd expect from a film about the devil. It feels more like a locked-room mystery where the devil just happens to be behind everything than an actual, all-out, Exorcist-level demonic event. The real spook factor was more in the way these people converged to be in the same place, and how the outside help... fire fighters, building security... seemed to run into a series of "Final Destination" style accidents.
I also want to point out that one of the people in the elevator was meeting her lawyer on floor 42.
Not a lot of my counts got triggered in this film. I did drop my needles once or twice for intense moments, but that was it. Maybe an eyeroll at the "ooh-rah" by the former Afghanistan soldier. Civilians in the film industry love to throw that shit around like it's candy. It annoys me almost as much as civilians in a film tossing off a salute. Don't do that. It just annoys former service members who know what it truly means.
Overall, this is a good film to craft to. A lot of talking. When there's something going on that you need to actually look at to get the full impact, the music cues you into it nicely. I didn't care for this movie much the first time around, but a second viewing years later has made me a bit more lenient. Four out of five stars. If I had felt the supernatural vibe a bit more, it might have gotten a perfect score.
No comments:
Post a Comment