Tuesday 4 February 2014

Look Who's Talking 666. Devil's Due


By now you've almost certainly seen the viral video promotion for this film with the remote control devil baby in the pram. If not, this is it...


It would be a cheap shot to say that this clip is better than the film itself; which it's not, but it may the first time that someone makes more money from the marketing clip than the actual film. Everybody seems to be lining up to commit infanticide on this movie but I actually thought it had enough interesting stuff going on to make it worth my while.

I must admit my heart sank when I realized it was yet another 'found footage' movie but for a change it does lend itself to the subject matter. We're following a newly wed couple on their big day, on their honeymoon and through their pregnancy. It's the sort of thing that people do believably record every detail of for posterity. What most people don't do on honeymoon however is allow an unliscenced taxi driver to show them a "good time" at a hidden rave in the backstreets of an unknown part of town in a foreign city. Most people would be flinging themselves into the road from the car to avoid this situation rather than filming it .... but I guess there is precedent in the real world for people being that naive. Actually I thought this part of the film had a real frisson to it. Santo Domingo hasn't really been used as a location before and certainly not at night so it does capture the fear of being caught off the tourist map and it is unsettling to see this couple make the bad decisions that will seal their fate.

Then something happens on that night. We know it involves something to do with ritual Satanic practices; they remember nothing and wake up with hangovers so figure they must have had a good night. You'd think they might just have a quick look at the hours of footage they recorded, just to see....but wouldn't you know it, they've got a plane to catch.

*spoilers*

The honeymoon is over, Sam(antha) is pregnant and life is good. Life must be very good because whilst we see their big house and their big telly and their big computer we never actually see them do jobs or anything. All the usual horror movie shit starts happening: "Oooh look there's a man across the street just staring at us", "Oooh look the family dog is behaving weirdly", "Oooh look here's the new creepy man doctor instead of the nice lady doctor I had before". On top of all this we have that new trope common to recent found footage movies I've seen where being marked out for a greater purpose equates to having superhero like abilities. We see Sam effortlessly punch in car windows and then develop telekenetic powers. Best of all, this heavily pregnant woman can carve up the floorboards and sneak out of the house to kill deer in the woods without her candid cameraman husband noticing.

But the thing is, pregnancy is scary enough without Satan being involved, and there's some genuinely unnerving sequences in the middle part of this film that exploit that. These scenes don't involve big jumps or special effects but exaggerate those intimate moments that signify change and can be unsettling. We see vegetarian Sam's sudden overpowering lust for raw meat; we feel her horror of medical probing and prodding and we see her change into a different person when threatened, overstressed or exhausted. All of that stuff is literalized very effectively. One of the best scares is set during a group antenatal class and relies on nothing more than timing and surprise. Such moments show real invention and are so much better than the predictable jolts of most contemporary multiplex horror.

Matters escalate at the right pace but the film becomes uneven towards the end as if it's fully aware that it doesn't really have a good enough ending to give birth to. The last ten minutes are very similar to last ten minutes of all these found footage things: an extended segment of one character's POV as they are chased through a maze of rooms and corridors and encounter choreographed scares and flying furniture. It doesn't really pay off in any satisfying way but at least it doesn't end with a demon faced baby in a pram gnashing its jaws at you.

Saying 'Devil's Due' is a a rip-off of 'Rosemary's Baby' is liking saying every shark movie rips off 'Jaws'. Critics who are saying this probably haven't seen Rosemary's Baby recently. Polanski's film is about the fears of pregnancy yes, but the focus is more on how Rosemary is manipulated, controlled and sedated by everyone around her: the witch coven, the medical profession and even her husband to deliver the antichrist unknowingly into the world. This film is much more about the very real things expectant couples have to go through. The medical and psychological horrors are blurred into the supernatural ones. In Rosemary's Baby,  John Cassavetes basically sells his soul to the devil for short term success. The husband here hasn't got a clue what's going on other than that his wife and mother of his child is turning into a monster. It's unsaid, but implied that Sam is fully aware of what's happening to her but is powerless to undo it.

There's still a lot of horror to be tapped from the pregnancy theme and this film for the most part makes a decent job of it.  Give the 'Devil's Due' its due.















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