William Trent Bell, just so we’re 100% clear on this point,
is one of the biggest hacks in Hollywood right now. Starting out on a pretty
sour note with Stay Alive, one of the more laughable video game movies out
there, he then made a return a few years with The Devil Inside… wow, even
mentioning that film nowadays is painful, let alone the prospect of watching
it. Undoubtedly one of the single worst found footage movies ever made, which
is no easy feat considering its woeful competition, it was also one of the most
bafflingly marketed films in recent memory, encapsulated with an ending that is
about as bass-ackwards as you can get for any
cinematic production. At the time of writing this review, I have yet to see his
third release Wer but, to put it bluntly, I don’t need to to know that this has
a very high probability of being godawful. I’d normally say that I welcome the
opportunity of being proven wrong… but let’s be real here: That ain’t happening
this time around.
The plot: Greta (Lauren Cohen), wanting to escape her demons
in the U.S., takes up a job as a nanny for an elderly couple in the UK.
However, upon arrival, she discovers that she will be serving as a nanny for a
porcelain doll that the couple allege is both alive and their son. While
connecting with local delivery man Malcolm (Rupert Evans) and getting used to
this bizarre arrangement, it turns out that the doll may not be as harmless as
she thought and, if she doesn’t follow the rules, she could be in for a lot of
trouble.
The cast is okay but it’s not as if anyone here is on their
A-game. Cohan is incredibly bland, channelling a performance that I’ve
unfortunately come to expect from low-grade horror fare: Placid to the point of
potential psychosis. Evans, once the realisation sets in that, yes, this is the
same guy who played Agent Myers in the first Hellboy movie, is actually quite
charming, managing to make even his awkward dialogue sound
palatable. Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle as the Heelshires do end up adding a
bit to the ridiculousness of the main plot, but credit to them as they
definitely convey a legitimacy when it comes just how much their characters
obey the rules concerning the boy. Ben Robson appears later on as a
lightly-grilled red herring, and he’s about as one-note as the scenes preceding
him set him up to be.
Wow, this film’s tone is all over the goddamn place. Not
only that, wherever “the place” is, it’s certainly nowhere in the vicinity of
horror. Right from when Greta first meets Malcolm, that sense of awkward
giggling ends up permeating the rest of the film because, quite frankly, it
doesn’t even feel like they’re trying to scare us. The main conceit with the
doll is treated so straight-faced and normal that it stops feeling like
anything psychologically tinged and more just as a complete farce. I’m going to
chalk this up to a real lack of effort as this sort of direction into comedy
usually comes around when a film fails to properly establish a horror-required
atmosphere, instead turning it into something one shade darker than a quirky
indie comedy. It’s difficult to find the little doll boy creepy when barely
anyone in the film treats it as such, made worse by how easily the most
damaging thing the doll apparently does is prevent Greta from going on a date
with Malcolm. Um… where’s the suspense in rom-com-level inconveniences?
Of course, when the film actually tries to be scary, it’s
through amazingly weak means. Having something scary happen and then the
character waking up from it has been old-hat and tired for a really, really long time now, so why in the hell
does it appear not once but twice in
this bloody thing? Credit where it’s due in that composer Bear McCreary, when
he isn’t just flat-out letting orchestra stings create cheap horror for the
film, is trying to give a nice eerie texture to the film, but William Trent
Bell clearly has no idea what to do with it because everything is just
portrayed so blandly. This reaches a point of lunacy when we discover who
Brahms really was, told to us with
all the grace and emotional finesse of a Gilligan cut. Seriously, it feels more
like a punchline than any kind of dramatic revelation. Basically, when it even
bothers to try and give chills, it sucks, and when it tries to create drama, it
equally sucks. Good God, it’s like the director took everything that is meant
to be focused on in a horror film and then directed his attention to literally anything
else except for those.
Actually, slight addendum to my statement above: The real point of lunacy here is with the
ending. Now, anyone who has suffered the utter idiocy that is the non-ending of
The Devil Inside will know William Trent Bell isn’t exactly the sort of person
who creates reasonable endings to his stories. Well, while this isn’t quite as bad as that, it is still
remarkably stupid and quite possibly one of the most ill-conceived climaxes
I’ve seen all year. Now, without getting too heavily into spoilers, I’ll just
say that this film initially tries to keep the audience guessing in terms of
who or what the doll actually is: Is it possessed or are the people in the
house simply going crazy? Admittedly, for the first ten or so minutes at least,
it does a decent job at that… and then it just decides that it wants to have it
both ways, possibly as an attempt to please everyone regardless of
expectations. Well, hate to break it to these hacks, but satisfaction doesn’t
work that way. Sure, taking the route that they did could have worked out a lot
better in the hands of much more competent filmmakers, but here, it just feels
like a tremendous ass-pull from a couple of idiots who wouldn’t dare make up
their minds on the plot of their own fucking movie. I’d call it laughable if it
weren’t for the fact that it makes none of the sense, which in turn ends up
creating more annoyance and anger than it does laughter.
All in all, this is essentially an update of the 1988 horror
film Pin, only somehow even goofier. And bear in mind that that film included a
scene where a nurse has sex with the titular anatomically-correct dummy. The
acting is bare minimum for this kind of story, the direction is tone-deaf to
the extreme and the writing, not really knowing what kind of tone this should
have, tries to juggle the potential outcomes and ends up failing at both of
them. William Trent Bell remains a glaring red flag of a filmmaker, and the
fact that this is his first that he didn’t help write shows that the likelihood
of him making anything worthwhile has grown even smaller.
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