The Devil's in the (Lack of) Details

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I gotta I glanced around the elevator coming up to my office this morning, sizing up my possible fate-mates. I'm watching you, blond lady!

But the problem with Devil is ten minutes in you realize, right around the time these five random (or should I say "random") folks find themselves trapped in the devil's elevator - and man I wish this movie had been called The Devil's Elevator so the tag-line coulda been "Hating It Up While They're Going Down" - that the entire answer to the query you've been presented with - Who Is The Devil? - will be arbitrary. We get the slightest of nods towards each captor's personality at the start and then they stand around like question marks while erratic facts about each of them are dropped into our laps. He was in Afghanistan! She stole a wallet, once! Clues that they want us to read, decipher, so perhaps we can piece together the mystery!

But there is no mystery. There is only randomness. And that becomes painfully brutally obnoxiously clear at the end when The Devil and his (or her!) plan is revealed and it could've been slapped onto any character and not made a damn difference. You get the sense that the person who it ends up being was chosen simply because somebody thought they'd look the niftiest with black contact lenses in their eyes.

It's a well-made film, it looks good and the actors are generically watchable (pleased to make your acquaintance, Logan Marshall-Green) and flashes of darkness with just sound to guide us are used well - a trick the director no doubt learned from crafting Quarantine, the American remake of [REC] - but you realize too early and the script isn't clever enough to keep you from seeing there's a devil under every shell in this game. And so I never cared. It has its way with you and tosses you aside like rubbish. That's fine in the bedroom but less so in the cinema.
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