Review of The Devil Inside (2012) by Inaneswine — 14 Nov 2017

The Devil Inside is a mad hybrid of various different films, ranging from The Exorcist, to Blair Witch, to Paranormal Activity - with all the interest, terror and excitement of those films cast out like an unclean spirit. The film draws on so many other sources that it has trouble establishing its own identity.

Another film attempting to cash in on the recent handy-cam craze, it is a faux-documentary that follows a woman trying to discover what went wrong in her mother's exorcism 20 years prior, which resulted in the deaths of three people and a life-long spell for her mother in an insane asylum.

A fairly unoriginal, but decent enough premise. The film does actually make some interesting commentary on the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church, and contains one or two well-timed scares. But the film is let down by clichéd jump-out-of-your-seat moments that you can see coming from a mile away, like the unexplained orchestral booming noise that occurs whenever the camera looks at something scary, and a ridiculously abrupt ending that stops the film dead in its tracks.

If you're gonna go with the whole "found-footage" thing, you have to keep it discreet. It's dangerous to show too much, whereas the likes of Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity did mostly suggestion work. Hell, even Cloverfield didn't let you see too much of the monster. The Devil Inside just keeps throwing too much in your face, and it becomes predictable.