Chilling Devil’s Door Worth Walking Through
Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a rising star amongst area real estate agents. She is ambitious, unafraid to take on difficult properties knowing that with hard work and a never-say-die attitude she’ll be able to see things through to a profitable sale. But her latest acquisition comes with numerous question marks and a number of problems, not the least of which is a teenage girl (Ashley Rickards), supposedly the runaway daughter of the former owners, constantly lurking on the premises for reasons she refuses to explain.
Leigh’s little sister, struggling artists Vera (Naya Rivera), doesn’t share her older sibling’s drive or passion towards starting a family. Their parents have been out of the picture for some time now, the trauma of those events still influencing every decision the young woman makes. But when tragedy takes Vera out to the property Leigh was in the early stages of preparing to market she, too, comes face-to-face with the mysterious girl in the red raincoat, their meeting forcing her to reconsider all perceptions of faith, family and parenthood she’d up to then taken for granted.
It’s easy to give too much away when talking about writer/director Nicholas McCarthy’s supernatural horror show At the Devil’s Door. At the same time, what ultimately ends up happening isn’t a surprise, putting the fractured pieces of this demonic puzzle together fairly easy to do. Yet, as a follow up to the filmmaker’s winning 2012 debut The Pact, At the Devil’s Door is a moderately fascinating freak-out bristling with suspense and oozing with dread. It got under my skin, everything building to a suitably unsettling denouement I found myself thinking about and pondering long after the film itself had come to an end.
Much like Proxy, the film is a bait-and-switch enterprise where the rug gets pulled out from underneath the viewer fairly early on, points of view shifting from one protagonist to another with swift, almost cold-hearted suddenness. Mixed into this is the story of the teenage girl, her backstory intermingled into Leigh and Vera’s narratives showing how she sadly ended up in such a devilish state of being. It’s an interesting conceit, to be sure, and more often than not McCarthy handles these switches in perspective and changes in focus rather nicely, in the end all these disconnected tangents coming together nicely allowing the final sequences to pop with carnivorous certainty.
One gets the feeling cinematographer Bridger Nielson (Splinter) did a long study of the films of Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, John Carpenter and Alain Resnais before he set forth on lensing this one for McCarthy. His camera glides to and fro with insidious grace, building tension through subtly with the items on the outskirts of the frame apparent enough to make out yet still maintaining a mysterious allure that is as foreboding as it is beguiling. Visually the film is a consistent stunner, Nielson’s work so good it’s a pity no one is going to remember it come award season at the end of the year.
All three actresses are terrific but it’s impossible not to wish that former Maria Full of Grace Oscar-nominee Moreno had more to do than she actually does. The early sequences focusing on her bristle with a character-driven complexity going way beyond the familiar cadences of McCarthy’s script, her internal battles hinting at regrets and heartaches impossible to talk about and even more difficult to forget yet ones just about anyone can relate to in at least some small part. As good as both Rickards and especially Rivera might be, and both are very good indeed, Moreno once again shows everyone just how deserving of better, more complex parts she remains, and it’s a pity she’s not been the recipient of any since her Best Actress nomination a full decade ago.
At a certain point there are only so many places McCarthy can ultimately take things, and while he handles the climactic revelations with confident authority that doesn’t make them feel any less run of the mill and, sad to say, ordinary. While a childish gaze chills to the bone, bringing to mind images of a baby Damien getting one last look at his fallen adoptive father in the original The Omen, I can’t say it’s enough to satisfy, at least not entirely.
Still, the director continues to showcase himself to be a talented craftsman with an eye for detail and passion for character development. At the Devil’s Door hardly breaks new ground or does the unexpected but it still manages to get the job done, its satanic thrills unnerving in both their power and their intensity.
Film Rating: 3 out of 4
