The Devil Inside bestows last rites on dying genre
Even a priest couldn’t save low-budget horror flick
Does anyone know a good exorcist, because there’s a patient here possessed by a relentless demon. The victim is our old friend the low-budget horror movie, and it’s having a devil of a time shaking the conceit of “found footage” — mock documentary, faux news reports, the headache-inducing camera work that combines black-and-white home video with buzzy static to persuade us that what we’re watching isn’t a movie as much as it is a surveillance video.
That’s because the truth, as we all know, is out of focus.
It started with The Blair Witch Project, moved on to the paranormal activity phenomenon, and now it’s migrated to Rome — where in fact there appears to be a healthy supply of exorcists — in The Devil Inside. This is a horror film that isn’t exactly scary, and not quite entertaining, but does manage to make you queasy for 87 minutes. It also has the advantage of being the only movie to open on the first weekend of the new year, thus providing a reassuringly low bar for 2012: Most everything else will probably seem superlative by comparison.
The Devil Inside begins with a disclaimer that, “The Vatican did not endorse this film, nor assist in its completion,” thus reaffirming the suspicion that the Vatican is not run by fools. Then we see mock police footage of a murder in 1989: one Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) has murdered two priests and a nun in her home in South Hartford during an exorcism. It’s messy and authentic looking: “Found footage” has become a cliche, but along the way, filmmakers have become expert at replicating its shaky grit.
Twenty years later, Maria’s daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) wants to know what happened that day and why. Maria, who was found to be criminally insane, has been transferred to a mental hospital in Rome, just outside the Vatican. Isabella must visit her there, accompanied by a documentary cameraman (Ionut Grama), and learn the truth.
After a visit to a school for exorcists — remember when all the young people were getting fine arts degrees? — she meets with her mother in the insane asylum. It’s a suitably creepy interview: Crowley has the right combination of dishevelled vacancy and mad hospitality of those who are hosting a demon or two. The basic cocktail that has unsettled us ever since The Exorcist — contortions, speaking in tongues, sudden lunges at the presiding priest — has never been improved upon. The advance here is the idea of multiple demonic possession: Maria may be housing four demons. We’re going to need more holy water, father.
Isabella gets in contact with two renegade priests (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) who perform freelance exorcisms despite the disapproval of the church bureaucracy. A lot of The Devil Inside deals with the reluctance of Vatican officials to endorse the practice, but frankly the ethical dilemmas of the two clerics isn’t really that engaging. Seriously, is someone going to twist their bodies into impossible postures of hellish evil or are we going to sit around debating the rights and wrongs of banishing Satan?
Director and co-writer William Brent Bell (who in 2006 unleashed an unholy horror movie called Stay Alive) manages to keep the tension at the same level — not quite boiling, but always squirmy — despite the handicap of working in a genre that no one really believes any more. When Blair Witch came out in 1999, some viewers were taken in, but today, this pretend reality doesn’t fool anyone. That’s especially true of the ending, a monumental cop-out whose only benefit is that the movie stops. Be gone, The Devil Inside. Don’t even think about a sequel.