DEVIL’S DUE (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett). 90 minutes. Now playing. See listing. Rating: NN
It’s not hard to make a serviceable B movie about a possessed child in utero. It’s even easier to make a found footage horror movie. Devil’s Due is dull and frustrating to watch, and it might be the first case of material that could have become a perfectly enjoyable horror lark ruined by the found-footage strategy.
Newlyweds the McCauls (Allison Miller and Zach Gilford) have recently returned from their honeymoon in the Dominican to find out they’re expecting. They don’t realize that they were drugged at a nightclub and were part of a ritual in which the wife was made to carry the first of many anti-Christs to usher in the end of days.
Miller and Gilford have great chemistry, but every time they come close to saying something interesting about the fears of pregnancy and starting a family, the constraints of the pic’s first-person filmmaking nullify any suspension of disbelief or enjoyment.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (members of the directorial collective Radio Silence, who created the genuinely entertaining final story for the first V/H/S anthology film) let their movie devolve into a bunch of pointless jump scares that feel forced. It’s a problem that could be solved easily by just making an actual movie instead of relying on the bullshit pretense that any of this is actually happening. There isn’t a single scene that wouldn’t work better without the found-footage gimmick, and hardly a word of the script would need to be changed.
This is a cynical way to make a horror movie on the cheap these days, and it’s a shame that it happened to a film that has some potential.
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