DEVIL

DEVIL (PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, some profanity & sexual references):  Don't write this off as just another M.Night Shyamalan bomb.  Sure, Brian Nelson's script - from a Shyamalan story - lacks the kind of dialog & direction to flesh out the characters and, sure the idea of a small group of trapped people dying off without knowing who's doing it, has been done many times before (Agatha Christie used it often), but the quality that makes some Shyamalan movies powerfully dramatic - "The 6th Sense," "Signs," & "The Village" - and this movie rises above all its defects with the best in suspenseful technique the director has up his sleeves.

He sequesters five people in an elevator dozens of levels above the main floor - an old lady, a salesman, an ex-soldier, a young woman, & a security guard - with a police detective outside in the control room attempting to communicate with them -  Shyamalan builds in a religious element (Satan is among them) - building suspense and terror, not so much in what happens, but what director John Erick Dowdle (with the obvious support of Shyamalan in the background, Elliot Greenberg's snappy editing, Tac Fryemalo's use of camera to increase the cramped, trapped feeling, and Frenando Valequez's mood music heightening the terror - it adds up to just what a horror flick is supposed to do: trap the viewer into accepting the underlying silliness of it all to believe for 80-minutes that something horrible is happening.  One thing that lifts this from the run-of-the-mill horror movies (which rely on special effects & a heap of electronic devices) is the simplicity of the delivery - slowly, but surely, creeping over you until by the final statement:  if there is a devil, then there certainly must also be a God; well, however questionable it is, it adds of substance that the other shrieking flicks lack.  (Grade:  B)