With Devil’s Due, an Antichrist-driven fright flick from 20th Century Fox (the studio that brought us The Omen trilogy many, many years ago) the filmmaking collective known as Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella) get to show off what they’ve got. That’s kind of a big deal to genre fans fond of Radio Silence’s “10/31/98” – a potent, chaotic Halloween night-set haunted house tale featured in the anthology horror film V/H/S. Devil’s Due, disappointingly, isn’t the scary feature debut we wanted to see come from this promising quartet, however.
Perhaps the first misstep was beginning the film at the end, an increasingly tired trope to “hook” the audience. When you present what appears to be the conclusion of an arduous, bloody journey featuring one of your lead characters as they to recount their story…well, we now know they’re going to come out on the “alive”-end of things and any notion of suspense goes out the window. The second offense? That pesky “found footage” (or in this case faux home movies footage) narrative technique. When Devil’s Due isn’t busy trying to justify the need for this device, the astute audience member is going to be thinking how certain angles are being covered to capture the bit of plotting we need to see. This is none more apparent than during the film’s third act when things really escalate.
But most of all: Devil’s Due doesn’t deliver any of the frights Radio Silence gave us in “10/31/98,” nor does it carry the simmering dread we experienced in Rosemary’s Baby. The film simply presents an intriguing set-up and then plods along to a predictable end.
Zach Gilford and Allison Miller are cute and relatable enough as Zach and Samantha, a newlywed couple who venture down to the Dominican Republic on their honeymoon. There, they encounter an a taxi driver who is all too eager to get them where they’re going, but not before making a friendly offer to take these lovebirds for one last drink on the eve of their departure back home. “Friendly cabbie” takes Zach and Sam to a hole in the wall bar (literally, the place looks like a cave), they proceed to get drunk and then seem to black out for some dark ceremony that Samantha is part of. Several weeks after they land back on U.S. soil, Sam discovers she’s preggers. Devil’s Due follows that bumpy, bloody pregnancy to the very end.
I’m all for the slow-burn, trust me. But Devil’s Due is a slow-burn with little to latch on to. It tediously spins its wheels forgetting what made Rosemary’s Baby work in the first place. That film was front-and-center about Rosemary, a scared, pregnant woman unsure of what was coming. There was paranoia and a sense of the unknown. Devil’s Due tells us everything from the start, “this is going to get bad” (hell, the first thing we see in the film is a quote about the Antichrist – which is later, strangely, repeated) but then I had a hard time finding an emotional anchor in either Zach and Samantha. And because I was already ahead of these two as far as information was concerned, all I really cared about was seeing “HOW it was going to get bad.” Sadly, it’s all rather formulaic punctuated by a few clever moments (Sam’s sudden hunger in a grocery store was amusing). Gilford and Miller are quite good and believable in their respective roles, but the approach to the story and the way in which it is told (ahem, “found footage”) held me back from making any connection to them.
Devil’s Due goes out with a bang, but by this point any good will that should have been built up through the film was absent and I wanted nothing more than the film to come to an end. The movie tries hard to recapture an old school vibe and put a contemporary spin on it, but you’d be better off simply revisiting the classics that have explored similar waters.
