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"What a bore these horror films that are never scary"; "but why do they keep making them": these are the questions that have been swirling in my head for some years now when my eye would catch a new Hollywood release, and, albeit with less drive, for the French ones. It is probably due to this inertia that my subconscious has regressed to a prenatal state, but the fact remains that this "Devil" managed to produce some much-desired shivers down the spine.
Looking at the cover, it is easy to think it's the usual thriller; so I read the summary: "5 people trapped in an elevator"; and I'm still not convinced; until I read: "and one of them is the Devil"...And here are the first glimmers in the light of my interest ignited. We must be honest: the Devil taking human form isn't exactly new, but it's not as cliched as one might expect either, and with this realization, I decide without further hesitation to get it. With the start of the images, I must admit, I'm quite enthused: New York skyscrapers scanned with a top-down shot..."Not bad...not bad". At this point, the plot starts to take shape, i.e., we are talking about a Latin-American folk legend, that of the devil who gathers five people with a murky past, each with a criminal record, ending up claiming their souls, yet not before a proper game of cat and mouse.
Of course, an interesting idea doesn't make the movie, and it's thus that the Dowdle brothers in directing maneuver quite successfully in the undertaking of honoring the subject of the acclaimed M. Night Shyamalan, through a diverse cast and many little measures aiming to maintain the suspense; yeah, because up to roughly three quarters of the film, the actual presence of the devil among the trapped people is not even evident... assuming it is indeed the Adversary in person (which I won't reveal here).
As genre lovers know, real fear inspired by a movie is a matter tied to childhood: I remember the film Relic which made my friends and me jump from our theater seats. The most you can expect from the Horror genre in the strict sense, thus setting aside works that focus more on existential discomfort (I'm thinking of Martyrs and Irreversible), boils down to just a couple of faint and awkward shivers down the spine, mostly induced by darkness (specifically the frequent blackouts in the stuck elevator) likely diminished by the impossibility of coming up with a truly original idea.
Take it or leave it.
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