Review of Here Comes the Devil (2012) by Christophe C — 20 Sep 2012

A kind of hyperextended horror story about parents' fears of their childrens' incipient sexuality - or, by extension, the entire process of growing up - Here Comes the Devil is a riot of conceptual shocks, staccato gore, and on-its-sleeve vampiness. The film leans heavily on snap-zooms and insistent split-focus shots, so that we can never fully banish the ghosts of campy exploitation B-movies in funny languages from years gone by. The performances, too, are overwrought and, in at least a few cases, not quite competent. This all fits the tone and style of the film, though, and on its mission to entertain and disturb, Here Comes the Devil succeeds admirably.

The film's intentions are run up the flagpole right from the first shot, where we cut hard in on two lesbians dry-humping one another for several minutes before collapsing on the bed to ruminate on the consequences of it all. This is of no matter, because a serial killer shortly bursts through the door and attacks them; the killer then flees, mortally wounded, up a scree of boulders in the middle of the desert, apparently to die.

The lesbians have a lingering thematic point in the film, but otherwise we are off on a different story immediately, as a young family takes a day trip to the desert, not far from that same scree of boulders. The children, Sara and Adolfo (who are thirteen and eleven, or thereabouts) want to climb up that hill on their own; the parents, Felix and Sol, let them go, happy for an opportunity to climb into the back of the family car and engage in some foreplay while whispering stories about their first sexual encounters. Naturally, at the exact moment mom and dad are getting off, son and daughter are disappearing into a triangular cave which cannot, given the surrounding context, be seen as anything other than an upside-down vulva - call this the anti-birth, as the children disappear inside. From this thick broth of imagery, naturally, things go very wrong - Sara and Adolfo disappear overnight, and when they are found, they just don't seem to be the same children.

Felix and particularly Sol suspect sexual abuse, and before long believe that they have proved it, persecuting an old drifter who was uncomfortably ubiquitous in the events surrounding the disappearance of the children (and unhealthily interested in Sara's panties, stained by the girl's first menstrual blood). Lead by primal urges to avenge their kids, Felix and Sol become monsters themselves - but as the evidence continues to pile up, it becomes increasingly clear that something even worse than sexual abuse must be behind the changes in the kids. A sequence in which a babysitter recounts her night with Sara and Adolfo - a night in which she woke up undressed, witnessed the kids engaged in unspeakable acts, and fainted dead away - is note-perfect and thickly chilling, and Here Comes the Devil tumbles down the mountainside with a kind of gravitic inevitability that makes the entire last act a rush of heedless moral nausea.

With the exception of Francisco Barreiro as Felix, none of the actors in the film are up to the task of living outside basic cliché. The performers playing the kids are particularly formless, even given the inherent formlessness of their blank-stare manners after they go into that cave. Subtitling provides an inadvertent buffer against these kinds of problems, however, so I still found Here Comes the Devil engaging even while I was aware that some of the workmanship was shoddy.

There are two dangling questions from the film, each potentially unimportant, each potentially disturbing in its implications: why did Sol have a large, visible bruise on her flank, that night in the hotel room? And why did the young siblings hold hands "as boyfriend and girlfriend" before they had ever gone into that cave?