Film Review: DEVIL’S DUE (2014)

The found footage film finds new life in the film Devil’s Due (2014), a thriller from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.  Zach and Samantha McCall (Zach Gilford and Allison Miller, respectfully) are on their honeymoon when an unexpected night out partying leaves them with little memory of how much fun they actually had in the morning.  It’s not long after that Samantha discovers that she is pregnant but nothing is going as it should.  This is a found footage film so it is Zach who is filming most of what’s going on and it is he who has a curiosity as to what is happening to his wife when mysterious people start showing up and following him everywhere he goes. 

This is very much a modern day retelling of Rosemary’s Baby as told from the perspective of the husband who is the paranoid one as his wife slowly succumbs to the influence of the thing growing inside her.   What the film gets right is the tension that builds between Zach and Samantha as he realizes that she is slowly slipping away from her.  What the film gets wrong is having to rely on the aesthetics of the found footage style to tell the story and how it unravels.

With so many found footage films now (still) being made it’s hard to realize just how many new stories can still be told without seeming to much like a cliché.  This film has its fair share of predictable reveals as is common for this genre.  If anything, this film doesn’t really add anything new to the found footage genre but only adds to the type of film that hadn’t already been tackled by this style.  I will say that very few people outside of fans of the found footage film will be entertained by this film because as is customary with this style very little really happens until the final third of the film.

Film Review: DEVIL’S DUE (2014)

There are a lot of things that newly wedded couples can fear but suddenly becoming pregnant is somewhere at the top of the list.  This is part of the premise for the film Devil’s Due (2014), a film that is a modern day retelling of the classic Ira Levin story Rosemary’s Baby by way of a found footage film.

Zach and Samantha McCall (Zach Gilford and Allison Miller, respectfully) have just gotten married.  Everything is perfect on their honeymoon except that at a party they drink a little too much and things get out of hand.  When they return home they discover that they are pregnant despite taking all precautions against it.  At first the idea of Samantha being pregnant is a godsend until, Zach discovers that she is acting strange and he starts to see strange men in the shadows watching over them.  As the day of birth looms ever so closer, Samantha believes that something “else” is going inside her and that the men in shadows want her baby for their own reasons.

With Satanic cults, demonic babies, and men in shadows there is a lot of ground that this treads that has been seen a hundred times before in other films.  The idea of doing this story as a found footage film is a novel one except that it wears its welcome off really fast.  What starts off as a genuine story tactic for the first third of the film (depicting the marriage and honeymoon) comes off as forced for much of the rest of the film and takes you out of the story.

Unfortunately, this is a problem with most found footage films (and films that copy the style) in which the overall story just doesn’t require the style for the duration of the film.  There’s an interesting idea to be had in this modern day version of Rosemary’s Baby but this was probably not the best way to go about it.