Tell me if this exchange sounds idiotic to you:
“I think I might have AIDS someday, doctor.”
“We may never know. I know one solution.”
“What is that?”
“Let’s give you AIDS and see if you have it.”
“I’m in!”
So if a girl is afraid she may be possessed one day like her mother, why on Earth do you bring her along on a dangerous possession ritual that may take the lives of all involved? What does that even prove? “But Felix, we wouldn’t have a movie if she didn’t go along.” Then why even call this a found footage film? Why not just stage it as a feature film?
And why not give us more a valid reason rather than stretching the bounds of common sense and logic? Just because cross media promotion worked for “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield” doesn’t mean every film has to use it as a crutch for its lack of climax. What “The Devil Inside” lacks, among many other things, is a powerful climax that provides respectable resolution and a reason to continue the narrative, so it abruptly closes with an ad for a website to continue the case. Why should we even continue the case when the movie was so piss poor and boring as hell to begin with? “The Devil Inside” is a blatantly cheap and by the numbers exorcist horror film that thinks it can show us a woman contorting her arms and consider it terrifying.
“The Devil Inside” is a movie that has ridden a wave of success thanks to the passing image of a nun with pearl white eyes that had no intent to scare audiences, but ends up becoming the most striking image in the film in either case. “The Devil Inside” is one big long drawn out bore of a horror film that takes us through the wringer as a movie that dares to question if being possessed by demonic entities as something at all capable, and then completely drives the movie home by leaving it ambiguous and pointing toward hysteria and madness. When writer William Brent Bell does finally drop the facade of mystery, he backs out yet again with a cheap, insulting, and ridiculous final scene that will likely be a burn to the select few people in America who lack internet service.
Fernanda Andrade, heaven help her, is given the job of portraying young Isabella Rossi plagued with the suspicion that she may one day end up like her mother, who is now a raving lunatic in a religious insane asylum. For all Andrade’s attempts to seem tortured, for the most part she fails to deliver a convincing performance. She’s very polished and attractive and never seems all too distressed. When she finally does unravel mentally, Andrade just can’t emote strong enough to suck us in to her dilemma and tortured life.
Ever since the spider walk in “The Exorcist” was added as a definitive scene in the film, directors seem to think that contortionists in exorcist movies are horrifying when they couldn’t be more wrong. As with all modern exorcism movies there is that drawn out moment where a possessed woman twists her arm in many places, demonstrating the power of the demon, and it’s inadvertently comedic, especially in its cheap ploy to avoid using any special effects. If contortionists were really scary, Cirque De Soleil would definitely leave many audiences traumatized. “The Devil Inside” is a pointless and awful attempt at tapping the exorcism and found footage sub-genre, and fails colossally on all levels. William Brent Bell’s “The Devil Inside” is a stupid, boring, and inane exorcise in bargain basement horror that fails to draw compelling characters and situations and in the end is just a waste of time, with a cheap ending that adds insult to injury to its audience.