Devil

Devil | Horror | Rated PG-13 (Violence) | staring Chris Messina, Jenny O’Hara, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, Geoffrey Arend, Logan Marshall Green, Matt Craven and Jacob Vargas | directed by John Erick Dowdle | written and produced by M. Night Shyamalan | 80 minutes.
Devil takes place in modern day Philadelphia at a building where a suicide has been investigated.

With a music score that would make Alfred Hitchcock proud, Devil begins with a passage from 1 Peter: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.  Followed by a narrator who explains the basics of a story about the Devil.  The narrator tells about a suicide that happens which is followed by a suicide at this Philadelphia building.  This suicide draws Detective Bowdon to investigate.  While Bowdon is doing this, five unfortunate people walk into an elevator that becomes stuck at the 23rd floor.  The five people who step in this trap are a salesman, a wealthy woman named Sara, a temp. security officer named Ben, an elderly woman and a mechanic.  Two security guards are watching the people in the elevator as it becomes stuck and call in the police when Sara is suspiciously bleeding.  The guards cannot hear what is going on in the elevator and must figure out what is going on.  Detective Bowdon comes to the monitor room and talks to the people in the elevator trying find out more about them.  Through a series of networks, he finds out little details about each person.  The narrator interjects his commentary giving clues as to what will happen next.  As the first person dies in the elevator, it is a race to find out who and why the murder is taking place.  Ramirez, a security guard becomes superstitious and begins to tell the basics of a devil story his grandmother would tell him.  After a series of strange occurrences in the elevator, Bowdon asks Ramirez happens in these stories so that he can stop what will happen next.  Tensions rise in the elevator when each passenger learns more about each other.  The rising tensions along with what the detectives learn build up to a climatic ending where everyone in the elevator is a suspect.

Devil has the basic elements of a M. Night Shyamalan movie.  The narrator tells the basics of a Devil story.  Ramirez does the same.  In previous Shyamalan movies, characters talk about the elements of a story.  Another element of a Shyamalan movie is that many elements of the story takes place when the audience cannot see what is happening.  For example in Signs, the aliens are only seen for a flash moment and the audience is dependent on the what they hear outside of the walls of a house.  In Devil, the lights in the elevator go out frequently, which the audience is only privy to the sounds of what is taking place and ponder what will happen when the lights come back on.  Even though John Erick Dowdle directed this movie, it has the M. Night Shyamalan feel.

This movie was enjoyable to me because it felt like a novel put on screen.  When the narrator speaks his commentary, I thought this was like the heading of a chapter.  Even though this story that the narrator tells is very generic, it tells the audience what will happen next.  What happens next is that the characters interact to each other to find out their stories.  Through the characters telling their stories, we find out enough to make suspect a different person.  This is like a collection of short stories in a mystery novel.

Although the audience is being told what is going to happen, the timing of sequences can still make people jump out of their seats.  For anyone who likes classic horror movies, this has a lot of flash sequences that create suspense.  I recommend going to see this movie for the elements of story telling and the Hitchcock like suspense.