Once, long ago, back when motion pictures were still something of a half-formed fetus of differing technologies and formats and forms of presentation, there was a type of film that we now call “actualities” – it was basically putting the camera in place and turning it on, letting whatever get captured by the lens. You may have seen some of them, such as the Lumières’ “Workers Leaving the Factory” or “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”, or perhaps some of those acrobats and dancers gadding about in Edison’s Black Maria. They were documentaries in the purest sense, they documented everything that happened before the camera.
A bit later, some folks, such as Robert J. Flaherty, and Cooper and Schoedsack, thought a long-form storyline running through all this footage they just shot of the land and its people would be just the thing to get an audience to sit and stay for the better part of ninety minutes. So with a bit of off-the-cuff staging on the part of their subjects and a bit of time in the editing room, the feature documentary was created. This tradition continues even to this day, where the vision of the filmmakers form and mold the “actuality” of the footage into a “documentary” of what they wish the folks in the theater to see, with varying degrees of success.
We as viewers of images presented before us as “truth” have lived through quite a bit of material since Nanook of the North – now that we live in Teh Future, where digital manipulation of images and sounds can be done by a 15 year-old with a good laptop, we have a fairly well-trained eye for what is presented to us when compared to what we perceive as the intentions behind the presentation. We know there’s an agenda behind nearly every documentary made. Frankly, we know we are quietly being lied to, and the contract between the filmmakers and the audience has evolved to this point, where the “documentary style” of filmmaking can and has been appropriated by makers of, well, fiction films.
Be that as it may, it doesn’t excuse the makers of The Devil Inside from ignoring some of the more basic movie-making skills that should be used when attempting to entertain. I blame The Blair Witch Project for starting this trend, but at least Blair Witch had its own internal logic, and stuck to it. Blair Witch was a movie based on “found footage”, shot solely by the participants. Okay, fun premise, and it worked well, at least for me. I wasn’t one of those folks that got motion sick when the camera gadded about in the woods. But the thing that always niggled in the back of my mind, and continues to do so when seeing other “fictional documentaries” like Paranormal Activity or Cloverfield, is that someone somewhere looked at all this “found footage” and said “Ya know, I bet I can edit this stuff together”. So for me, a film shot in the style of the documentary used to tell a fictional story is gonna have to be subjected to my “documentary viewpoint”, like it or not. It’s presented to me as a piece of edited actuality footage, so it should take the effort to keep itself honest to that premise. The Blair Witch Project did a pretty good job on that point, I think.
Cut to some eleven years later, and Devil Inside not only lost the point of “pseudo-documentary”, but even under the pretext of a professional cameraman holding the camera, the film couldn’t seem to keep a steady hand for more than a few seconds. There was so much spazy camera work it made Blair Witch look like an Ozu film. At least the herky-jerky handheld camera footage was intercut with a handful of static cameras bolted down around the participants, so it was a little like eating around those couple of vegetables one dislikes in an otherwise boring stew. The Exorcist by way of Dinty Moore, I suppose….
Story goes, back in 1989, a little girl lost her mom to madness – seems she killed three people and had to be put away. Later, the little girl discovers that Mom was actually being exorcised and she apparently was unhappy with the performance of the priest and two nuns, and had at them with various items of hardware one finds in a suburban basement. So, now 20 years later, not-little-anymore girl figures the best way to work through her festering grief is to make a documentary of her planned visit to see Mom, now being housed in a special Vatican-run asylum. Seems perfectly sensible, make a movie about your crazy mum imprisoned by the Vatican. Now that I think of it, I wanna take a trip to Rome with a professional documentary cameraman following me around, I can pretend to be Anthony Bourdain, and probably be able to write off the trip as a business expense. And those would be home movies that you’d want to see….
The Exorcist has been the touchstone for all Catholic-based demonic possession movies since Linda Blair got out of her training bra, and the filmmakers for Devil Inside at least had the sense to lift the whys and wherefores of possession from that particular playbook. Beyond that, well, even a little split pea soup would have livened this horror film up. A couple of good gags, one involving an inexplicable “cornea-cam” and another involving a bit of contortion that may spook folks who dislike people cracking their knuckles around them. A cat shock jump is lamely replaced by a barking dog shock jump. Lots of bulging eyes and yelling and shouting. And overall, debilitated by poor pacing and an ending that does nothing. Not to spoil anything, but this was one of those kind of “wait, what?” endings that make one sit in quiet anger for a couple of minutes. Remember how you felt at the end of Empire Strikes Back? Kinda like that, only garnished with a low-grade remorse for the time and money that have just slipped through your fingers.
The fella who played Father David was pretty good – Evan Helmuth is no Max von Sydow, but he hit some notable emotional marks. The rest of the actors seemed to have made notations in their scripts with fat markers – Say Words, Shout Here, Cry Here, Say More Words, Break Stuff….
Welp, there you have it, the first of my Seeing Every Film Released in 2012. The list now stands thusly:
The Devil Inside
Beneath The Darkness
Norwegian Wood
Roadie
Seems those last three aren’t playing anywhere in San Francisco just yet, but no matter – come Friday, I’ll have Contraband and Joyful Noise to contend with at the very least….
