The Devil Inside – Film Review

Twenty years after Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) murdered three people, her daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), seeks the truth about that terrible night. Isabella travels to an Italian hospital for the criminally insane — where Maria is locked away — to find out whether her mother is mentally ill or demonically possessed. With the help of two young exorcists (Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmuth), Isabella tries to cure Maria — and engages four demons in a battle for her mother’s soul.

Have you ever watched a film that was so terrible that led you to wonder how it possibly got greenlit, let alone made? A few movies come to mind for me, and one of them is William Brent Bell‘s The Devil Inside, which is one of the biggest wastes of seventy-five minutes you could possibly spend your time watching. The film actually clocks in at a total of eighty-three minutes, but amazingly, there are eight minutes of credits here to pad the running time out. Seriously.

The fact that this film managed to earn a total of $101.8 million at the box office is genuinely disheartening because it goes to show that we used to live in a time in which people would quite literally flock to the theatre to see jump scare-heavy horror flicks that had next to nothing to offer its viewers. If you make the decision to watch The Devil Inside, you will be forced to endure a film that has virtually no scares and spends the majority of its seventy-five minutes of screen time building up to an exorcism that is genuinely hilarious in how bad it is.

And once the exorcism scene is over, there are almost zero scenes that have any semblance of unease to them. It’s a dreadfully boring film that has easily one of the worst horror scripts I have ever had to put up with. As for the characters, they are all extremely flat with zero development given to them whatsoever. I didn’t like Fernanda Andrade‘s performance as Isabella Rossi here, but maybe I would have if screenwriters Bell and Matthew Peterman took the time to actually give us, the viewer, a reason to care about the protagonist.

Because we don’t care about her, whenever things go bump in the night, we kind of just sit back and watch the events unfold. There is no tension present and we don’t feel as though something is at stake mainly because we aren’t given a reason to care. For a film that is presented in a documentary-style format, it sure is uneventful and devoid of interesting information for audiences to digest.

And the ending does something that I have literally never seen any other film do – it ends with a card telling the viewer to visit a website to “learn more about the ongoing investigation”. It was at that moment when I realized that The Devil Inside is one of the laziest and disastrously put-together horror films ever made. Truly a misfire on all fronts.