The Devil Within (2016) Review
“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” Oh hang on, that’s the wrong film, forgive me, however if, after reading this review, you still end up watching this film you’ll forgive this confusion. The Devil Within has ripped the bare bones of the 1999 found-footage ‘classic’ wholesale barely bothering to add anything new to the mix. OK, so there’s no witch and it take places at a different location, but otherwise this could indeed be the same film. However where Heather, Mike and Joshua were unaware of the frights co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez would visit upon them during the night, here the actors are all too aware of what scares are coming their way. It’s a Blair Witch carbon-copy without the tension.
“In November 2012 Rachel Kusza (Maria Simona Arsu) and her team of film makers travelled to Transylvania to document the Baciu forest. A forest with a dark history of strange occurrences, ghost sightings and countless cases of missing people. The film crew were never heard from again. After searching for the film crew for two years Howard Redman (Tom Bonington), Rachels teacher, found the crews camera buried in the snow. Before taking own life on the 12th Febuary 2014 Redman uploaded the footage to the internet. It shows the crews dark and horrific journey into the woods, it shows why locals refuse to enter and it shows that you can never escape your past. This video is widely referred to as The Devil Complex.” (although it’s since had a title change to The Devil Within).
In director Mark Evans’ movie (that’s his plot description in the previous paragraph), his directorial debut, lazy exposition takes place of an original premise, with the characters telling us what’s going on/how they feel rather than let circumstances or their performances convey the same. An early example of this comes when Rachel talks to camera about how she has guessed that one of her very small team doesn’t like her. Rather than have something happen on camera to convey this apparent animosity to the viewer, we are told instead.
What does come across is how inept our lead threesome are for the investigatory journey they are undertaking, perhaps this is deliberate, if so it’s just plain annoying. Not one of them appears to speak the local language (could have been a real bummer if there was no one to hand to translate for them) and there’s moments – like when they check the inert body of their guide for a map when he was never seen using one because he didn’t need one, he knew the area, that’s why he was a guide – that made your brain blow up in frustration. Are university students really that dim? Apparently so.
It wasn’t long into viewing The Devil Within that I took to checking messages on my phone, and then after I had completed that, I scanned online news-feeds, casting a cursory glance to the TV screen, that’s how dull and formulaic it is. You could argue that by not giving the film my full attention that perhaps I have missed something. Fair point but no, The threesome chat to locals about the legend they are investigating, soon they start squabbling, they get lost, they get scared by things that aren’t actually scary, there’s really nothing here you haven’t seen in a thousand-and-one other found-footage flicks. I could have left the film running, gone outside, had a smoke and a natter with a neighbour, come back indoors fifteen minutes later and feel safe in the knowledge that I have missed nothing of any consequence.
One of the things that really bugs me with the ‘found-footage’ genre is who exactly found the footage, surely anyone finding the camera would have met the same fate? The Devil Within is a film that expects you to be scared purely for watching a film that purports to be scary. On the plus side the film’s retail packaging is exceptional, however do not expect anything that inventive or creepy in the actual film unless you find a snowy forest imaginative or creepy. It’s yet another case of terrific DVD packaging overselling a product undeserving of such a push.
