The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

So you hear the words ‘found footage’, ‘exorcism’ and ‘low budget’ in
the same sentence and you, rightfully, expect an awful horror movie that
instead of scaring you, has you walking out with a migraine. If you walk into
the cinema with this level of expectation, The
Devil Inside is a welcome surprise. It’s not scary in the slightest, but it’s
reasonably entertaining.

During an exorcism being performed on her, Maria Rossi (Crowley) murders
three people. She’s subsequently sent to a mental hospital in Italy where her
daughter, Isabella (Andrade), finds her almost twenty years later. On a quest
to find out exactly what caused her mother to flip out and whether or not this
could be a genetic affliction, Maria enrols in some exorcism classes given at
the Vatican where she meets two priests, Ben (Quarterman) and David (Helmuth),
who agree to help her mother. Accompanied by a documentary filmmaker who’s been
with Isabella since the beginning of her trip, they go to visit Maria where
they discover that she’s possessed by four different demons. Things get violent
and one of the demons hops over to David’s body instead, which nobody realizes
until he attempts to murder a baby. Ben and Isabella now have to try and save
David without getting possessed themselves.

Generally speaking, if you’re not going to show something scary on
screen, then you have to do a really good job of implying that something
epically terrifying is lurking just beyond the screen’s borders. The Devil Inside does neither. You can’t
see the demons hopping between the people and the extent of the action consists
of the possessed twisting themselves into some Cirque du Soleil worthy poses
and tossing things around violently. Not really the stuff that nightmares are
made of. 

On the plus side, the cast were adequate, if occasionally overwrought,
and the decision to have a character whose express role it was to follow
Isabella around filming her was visually smart, yet rather illogical
story-wise. This way we get to have a protagonist on screen at all times, although
there’s actually no reason whatsoever for Isabella to be making a documentary
about her trip to Italy.