The Devil Inside | Film review

Lucifer needs to change up his game. In the 38 years since he made a play for Linda Blair’s eternal soul, the Prince of Darkness has continuously dipped into the same bag of nefarious parlor tricks: twisting his host body into pretzel shapes, scrambling up the wall like an insect and talking smack (sometimes in Latin!) about dead mamas. As with 2010’s The Last Exorcism, this new bit of faux-vérité hokum attempts to give those old satanic scare tactics a trendy, mock-doc makeover.

The plot concerns a young woman (Fernanda Andrade) out to discover if her murderous mother, who’s been locked up in an Italian loony bin for 20 years, is possessed or just crazy. The central gimmick necessitates a lot of confessions to the camera, not to mention flagrant abuse of shakycam once the split-pea soup hits the fan. As for how the film stacks up against Paranormal Activity, which it apes even more shamelessly than it does The Exorcist, let’s just say the devil’s in the details. That the end credits cite a visual-effects artist is a pretty good indication of how concerned the filmmakers are with preserving the illusion of found-footage verisimilitude.