Can I get a “whoop whoop?!” M. Night Shyamalan is back to his old, good storytelling, great film-making self, and don’t tell me this isn’t a Shyamalan film. Were The Empire Strikes Back and Return of The Jedi not George Lucas films? Sure Shyamalan didn’t direct or write this script, but the film was based on his story and entirely under his oversight, and just like Empire and Jedi, Devil was better off for it.
Devil is centered around a stuck elevator car and the five people stuck inside it. Who these people are and what they are capable of is at the center of the plot, but the main character isn’t inside the elevator. He’s a broken police detective, mourning the loss of his wife and child, but like the tag line on the film’s poster says: “Bad things happen for a reason.”
I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs. Whereas Signs dealt with a sovereign God using everyday occurrences to bring salvation to a small family, Devil deals with the flip side, with a higher power drawing events together to bring punishment to sinful men. This idea is represented in a compelling and unique narrative that really made me think.
Strangely, Satan has taken the place of God as the punisher here, and actually manifest himself physically. Shyamalan understands that mankind deserves wrath for wrongdoing, but he gives the duty of judgment to the Devil, not God, and brings punishment only on those who are distinctly “bad people.” Clearly, Shyamalan doesn’t understand God’s holiness, taking the typical theist view that a good God can only love and never hate. One characters even states that the fact that Satan exists means that God also exists, which leans heavily towards dualism.
Christ is not present in name, but the idea of Christ’s self-sacrificial forgiveness is at the center of the story. Shyamalan shows us that we are fully responsible for our wrongdoings and deserve punishment for them, but that we can be forgiven if we confess our sins to those who we have wronged. For Shyamalan, this forgiveness occurs on the human level, but it also determines salvation from Satan and damnation. If anything, a Christian can take an allegorical message of Christ’s redemptive forgiveness away.
The cinematography was beautifully rendered by Shyamalan mainstay Tak Fujimoto, A.S.C. and the acting was very good, with small name actors way outplaying the goofiness that big name actors have dished out in Shyamalan’s last two features. Not everything was rosy. The film had its share of clunky dialog, with a character uttering “thanks for helping me out” when another simply holds a door for him. And a religious man narrates the film through a strange, made-up Spanish Catholic mythology reminiscent of the awfully bad mythos of Shyamalan’s lame Lady in The Water. But unlike Lady, it actually works here, helping to explain the supernatural plot. The good definitely outweighed the bad in Devil, and I can’t wait for part two of the this promised trilogy.