Bad hair day for the Devil

Film review: The Devil Inside (15) Rating: *
Fans of cult cinema may remember a movie called The Devil in Miss Jones. It was rather notorious in the 1970s for being a reasonably explicit pornographic thriller in which a woman journeys to the afterlife and develops an insatiable appetite for sex.
It was pretty rubbish, featuring a string of clunky (and very ’70s) sex scenes with silly bits of plot in between. I only mention it because even that piece of dated erotica offers a more convincing depiction of demonic behaviour than The Devil Inside, and would probably be more entertaining to boot. If you go in for that sort of thing.
The main problem is that director William Bell doesn’t seem to have worked out a structure for The Devil Inside. There’s a set-up, featured in the trailer, concerning the murder of three people in 1987 by Maria Rossi, a woman who purports to be possessed. In the present day, Rossi’s daughter travels to Rome where her mother is being held in a Vatican mental hospital. Enlisting the help of two young exorcists, she sets about investigating her mother’s plight.
All quite reasonable so far, but within 20 minutes or so the narrative loses all sense of direction, turning into a series of implausibly connected scenes, like someone reading a set of exorcist case-notes.
The whole thing culminates in an ending that is abrupt to the point of arbitrariness. To even call it an ending is to misrepresent it – the film merely stops. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with inconclusive endings (the brilliant final episode of The Sopranos being a case in point), but one does need to feel that the ending forms part of some broader structure, that the open-endedness forms a deliberate artistic choice on the part of director and screenwriter.
The Devil Inside’s ending is so frustrating because it is, to put it bluntly, unearned. Not only does it render the film’s opening scenes irrelevant, but it leaves you with the strong impression that the past 83 minutes have been a waste of everyone’s time, to the extent that not even the film-makers can muster the energy to finish it properly.
Add to the mix a few decidedly iffy performances, stultifying dialogue, and some rather ropey special effects, and you’re left with a unimpressive result. The Devil Inside, as is so disappointingly common among Exorcist clones, is a lazy and ill-thought out movie, which happily reflects the motifs of Friedkin’s masterpiece without adding anything of its own.
Meanwhile if you want to see a truly terrifying depiction of possession’, Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, telling the story of mass-hysteria in a French convent, is released on DVD this month for the first time in the UK, and is well worth a look.
It’ll certainly prove more compelling than this ramshackle mess.