by Frank Calvillo
Box Office Alternative Column
Box Office Alternative is a weekly look into additional/optional choices to the big-budget spectacle opening up at your local movie theater every Friday. Oftentimes, titles will consist of little-known or underappreciated work from the same actor/writer/director/producer of said new release, while at other times, the selection for the week just happens to touch upon the same subject in a unique way. Above all, this is a place to revisit and/or discover forgotten cinematic gems of all kinds.
Of all the filmmakers working today, M. Night Shyamalan has probably left me the most conflicted. There’s no doubting the man’s talented grasp on cinema or his ability as a storyteller to spin an involving yarn.
Yet for every Sixth Sense there’s another Happening, and Shyamalan’s loyal audience finds their patience tried with a half-baked story hidden under a usually intriguing premise.
It’s with great excitement (and somewhat blind loyalty) however that I’m looking forward to The Visit, which sees the director take a more minimalist approach to telling what has been called his scariest film in years.
The Visit isn’t the first time Shyamalan has gone small-scale to help tell a story however. Wedged between the overblown visuals of The Last Airbender and the best-forgotten After Earth, the director executive produced, created the story and collaborated on the screenplay for the still-underrated Devil.
Directed by John Erick Dowdle, and set in the familiar stomping ground of Philadelphia, Devil tells a story of a group of five people, including a slimy businessman (Geoffrey Arend), an older woman (Jenny O’Hara), a mysterious former veteran (Logan Marshall-Green), a young trophy wife (Bojana Novakovic), and a hot tempered security guard (Bokeem Woodbine), who find themselves stuck in the elevator of one of the tallest buildings in the city. While building maintenance and city police try and rescue the trapped five, strange occurrences begin as one by one the passengers end up dying, leading everyone to question the true identities of those in the elevator.
The sheer beauty of Devil is the filmmakers’ uncanny ability to balance essentially two different kinds of thrillers at the same time.
There’s the main action taking place inside the elevator with the incredibly hard to read characters. When the camera is focused in on the elevator with these people, the Agatha Christie-like setup is working at full force as is the tension of who will die next, who is doing the killing, and why. The constant replaying of Glenn Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” over the elevator speaker and the overall confined setting are appropriately off putting to the point that the audience continuously feels like they’re trapped in there as well.
It would have been easy for the makers of Devil to simply center the whole film around the action in the elevator since there’s more than enough suspense in that setup to carry an entire feature film. Thankfully though, the action outside the elevator easily matches the uneasiness inside. The adrenaline is high as the audience watches the authorities and building staff try to piece together the identities of the passengers, their histories and motivations. Moreover though, seeing how their overall presence there on that day has set into motion an irreversible chain of events in the outside world adds even more suspense to the proceedings.
Technically, Devil is about as sound as they come. The film’s sleek look bears no resemblance to its indie level budget, allowing for plenty of incredible shots, including an intense opening credits sequence featuring an upside down Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the music of Devil echoes both the film’s swift pace as well as the characters’ frantic mental states.
One of the more refreshing aspects of Devil is the absence of any major stars amongst the cast; most unusual for a film with this much of Shyamalan’s involvement. Instead, the cast, which also includes Chris Messina as a troubled police detective, Matt Craven as the head of the building’s security, and Jacob Vargas as his second in command, all of whom get to showcase their talents in roles requiring a wide range of emotion for each of them.
Devil’s plot borrows heavily from the old folklore tale called “The Devil’s Meeting,” where a supposed sinner has a scheduled rendezvous with the devil himself. Yet in spite of the film’s anti-faith plot and title, Devil ends up being anything but. The film definitely paints the devil as a malicious figure and offers up plenty of extra reasons why, most of which coming courtesy of Ramirez (Vargas). The filmmakers never let the religion factor overpower the film however, and make sure to keep reminding audiences that they are indeed watching a thriller.
Yet there’s no denying Devil‘s message of faith and belief that is delivered in a way that virtually no other film has been able to accomplish. Devil doesn’t preach about how going to church is important, but it instead holds up the importance of forgiveness. Not only forgiveness toward one another, which must be one of harder feats to accomplish, but also forgiveness toward ourselves, which for many is almost impossible to achieve. Yet in its final moments, Devil shows the power of being able to forgive and does it in ways which are far from preachy.
Critics were split on Devil upon first viewing, with some not really taking kindly to the faith-driven tone of the film. However others recognized Devil as a genuinely taut and well-paced horror/thriller that showed Shyamalan was still capable of delivering. Audiences agreed, making the modestly-budgeted film a smash that was able to earn back it’s entire budget upon opening weekend.
Released during a time when the saturation of remakes was really beginning to be the norm (and still populate the majority of the landscape), Devil proved there was still life left in the horror genre as well as in Shyamalan himself.
