Selling Satan

The relatively unknown directorial duo that is the Dowdle brothers (Drew and John Erick) has collaborated with writer Brian Nelson to bring to the screen a story by the infamous M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, etc.), who also produced the film. This thrill-free thriller is an uninventive Faustian confrontation, pitting a handful of wretched sinners against the figure of Satan incarnate, who tests the evildoers by tempting and tormenting them.

Shyamalan has gone on the record stating that the premise, plotline and twist ending are lifted part and parcel from Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None, and if the film has any intrinsic value at all, it is thanks entirely to its source material. Christie may have been a vastly overrated scribbler and possible anti-Semite, but the lady (or is it dame?) certainly knew how to shape a suspenseful and satisfying narrative.

The storyline unfolds as follows: Five strangers possessed of dark secrets find themselves trapped in a stalled elevator with the devil. It isn't immediately clear which member of the group is the Prince of Darkness, but needless to say, the passengers start dropping like flies.

A detective (Chris Messina as our protagonist) arrives on the scene to try and puzzle out the progressively bewildering and gory events. Two security personnel (Matt Craven and Jacob Vargas) look on in horror with him via closed-circuit camera as the poor sinners are picked off one by one.      

The cast of unlucky ne'er-do-wells doesn't feature any standout performances, and Messina is merely passable as the tortured lawman. The writing is fraught with clichéd stereotypes. Bokeem Woodbine's character serves as the token African American who grows indignant at being addressed informally, issuing forth with, "Bro? I ain't your bro," and Vargas's caricature of the religiously informed Latino plays the part of the pious and superstitious Christian.

Uncharacteristically, Shyamalan's tale has no grounding finale that reconciles the ostensibly supernatural phenomena with the realm of the remotely plausible. The notion that Satan walks among us is left unaltered throughout. The voiceovers that bookend the film attempt to reassure us with the choice remembrance of a consoling maxim from the detective's childhood: "If the devil is real, God must also be real." Some comfort, that.

Devil fits neatly into a subgenre of supernatural thriller - the biblical horror film (The Exorcist, The Seventh Sign, Constantine, etc.), and the reality represented is that of the old-school religious variety. One hopes the filmmakers behind this incarnation are cynical exploitive types rather than evangelical sermonizers. After all, cunning is a much more attractive quality than credulity. 

In previous reviews of Shyamalan's work, I've trumpeted my dislike of his stultifying approach to modern, mainstream sci-fi, but the point bears repeating. His brand of thriller is of the nap-inducing variety. There is simply no suspense, and the pseudo-intellectualism that passes for plotting in his scripts is enough to make a cat laugh.

Evidently the audience's response to this latest trailer involved ample booing and laughing, specifically at the mention of the producer's excessive and self-invented moniker. Why it took so long for this appropriate response to affectation and campiness to manifest itself is puzzling in the extreme, but it's heartening news nonetheless. It also goes some distance toward explaining why the film wasn't screened for the critical press.

The themes featured are drilled into the viewer again and again. The phrase "Take responsibility for your actions" is repeated to the point of nausea. Perhaps the brothers Dowdle and Mr. M. Night should take some of their own advice and abandon plans to transform the so-called Night Chronicles into a trilogy. They'd be doing angels, demons and moviegoers alike a considerable favor. 

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com