Even people who don’t believe in the Devil will find chills going up and down their spines when they watch Devil. One-word movie titles aside, Devil moves swiftly and engages your attention throughout. Devil provides pure genre thrills and the movie wisely never exceeds the sum of its parts.
The film starts out gliding over water and as the frame pulls out we see upside down skyscrapers indicating we are upside down. Because in Devil black is white if you know what I mean. While there are a couple of scenes spent developing characters at the beginning and end the majority of the film takes place in an elevator that has stalled somewhere around the 20th story of its respective building.
The cast is populated with mostly unknowns but if you watch a lot of film or television you’ll recognize people like the nominal lead Detective Bowden (Chris Messina). Most notable, perhaps for his similarity in look to Tom Hardy of Inception, is Logan Marshall-Green as one of the elevator occupants. The film unwinds mostly in real time and certainly in one day, adhering to Aristotle’s unity of time and space. The environment is either the cramped interior of the elevator or the rainy exterior of the connecting building.
Suffice it to say that the target audience for a film like this is based on the concept of the title. But when Devil pays off, and it does, those who came to be entertained will be.

- Michael Bergeron