The Devil Inside is a 78 minute advertisement for a website. There’s a chance I should have said ‘spoiler alert’ before telling you that but frankly this movie does not deserve my discretion. The Devil Inside is a con job; a fraud of a movie that leads audiences to the singularly most unsatisfying ending to a movie I’ve seen in my 13 years as a movie critic.
The Devil Inside begins as a rip off of The Last Exorcism as we get a fake documentary about exorcism told at first from a skeptical perspective before giving into the bone crunching, head-spinning, potty mouthed demon spectacle that the exorcism genre calls for; there is no such thing as a polite and well-mannered or thoughtful demon.
Relative unknown actress Fernanda Andrade stars in The Devil Inside as Isabella Rossi, the daughter of a killer. Isabella’s mother, Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley), murdered three members of her church as they were performing an exorcism… on her. Through some mysterious machinations of the church Maria ends up transferred to a hospital in Rome under the treatment of Vatican doctors.
It’s an interesting idea and for a short time director William Brent Bell even manages to keep you engaged. The cracks begin to show though after Isabella and her documentary making pal Michael (Ionut Grama) have traveled to Italy and hooked up with a pair of priests, Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth), who run an illegal side business as exorcists for hire.
Once the exorcists take a shot at saving Isabella’s mother, the movie careens downhill toward its controversial ending. The ending of The Devil Inside left the audience I was with seething with anger. There were boos, people throwing trash and more than a few people angrily talking about getting their money back.
There is nothing even the least bit redeeming about The Devil Inside. The film is a flimsy con-job; it’s two thirds of a movie sold for the full price of a ticket. The ending invites audiences to visit a website to find out more about Isabella Rossi. I won’t publicize the website here as it is merely an extension of the filmmakers’ failure to come up with an ending.
Instead of an ending we get a novelty; a vague, failing attempt to bridge the gap between the movie screen and the internet. If indeed it was the intention of the makers of The Devil Inside to get audiences to the website, they’ve failed to do so creatively. The audience with whom I watched The Devil Inside was about as likely to visit the website as they were to recommend The Devil Inside to friends.
