Review of Devil (2010) by Dawdlingpoet — 28 Nov 2021

Unsurprisingly, this is a quite claustrophobic film. It has a sinister, spooky undertone from the get go, with landscape shots of New York City showing a dark and stormy setting.

The characters all seem pretty run-of-the-mill, average people and it didn't especially grip me. Frankly, I felt it was a bit too fantastical - the way the plot escalated quickly, in seconds, due to short lived blackoutss (when the lighting in the lift stopped), the mystery around what was happening during those blackouts causing the characters to slowly panic and question their surroundings, it was pretty predictable. Having said that, as the plot gathers pace it did seem genuinely quite tense, both from the point of view of the people trapped in the lift and the security (and later police) employees. Its a film which involves a lot of second guessing and leaves the viewer trying to put the various pieces of the puzzle together, trying to figure out what (or whom) was causing the sudden 'attacks' to occur, whether morality indeed has a part to play or not.

There is quite a heavy use of music, or more instrumentation, throughout the film, adding to the tense, sinister feel it has, with booming , eerie chords playing, typical of horror and thriller films. Personally, I felt that there were some rather unsettling scenes and it did seem relatively creepy but I wouldn't say it was especially scary as such and I don't tend to watch a great amount of horror films. I felt that the film relied too much on a sort of heavy belief in satan and thus, its certainly not one for sceptics, who would likely find it laughable. I do think this film is quite flawed, it wasn't especially scary as such and I didn't feel that we had enough of an insight in to the individual characters trapped in the lift, to be really emotionally attached to any of them really, so its by no means great but to be fair I did watch the film through to the end, I did find myself trying to second guess who may be behind the various events, what the outcome may be and so on. Towards the end of the film, it took quite a (what seemed to me) comical turn, as I couldn't help but find myself wanting to laugh at the unlikely set of events. I thought that the presumed moral messages referred to by the narrator at the start of the film and later on by other staff members in the film, seemed a bit too sort of coincidental and again there was somewhat of a predictability aspect to it. I feel like I'm being a bit of a harsh critic but either way, it just didn't really 'work' for me, in terms of any sense of real originality, on an emotional level (feeling especially worried for specific characters) and so on. All that aside, it was distracting in a not-such-an-awful way I suppose and it was fairly entertaining, so I guess it could be worse but I certainly wouldn't by any means go out of my way to see this.

No, I definitely wouldn't recommend this film to others. Its lacking in originality, is pretty predictable, especially as far as horror films go and there is a real lack of character background, which (unsurprisingly) does it no favours at all. It does have a spooky feel about it and I suppose I found it quite watchable, although horror fans won't be much impressed with the lack of graphic bloody violent scenes, I imagine.