There’s this fun game you can play where you try to make movies sound as dull as possible, generally through generous amounts of understatement. For example, The Shining can be summed up as “a man struggles with writer’s block.” The Descent can be summed up as “a caving expedition encounters difficulties.” You get the idea.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s a good idea to go that dull when you’re providing a blurb for a movie, but I do think understatement is useful, especially when it comes to horror films, because it hopefully preserves a certain amount of surprise. Surprise is an important part of scaring people - not just the cheap startles of jump scares, but twists and reveals, the unexpected and unanticipated. It can come halfway in, or in the third act, or at the end (just not at the beginning, because that doesn’t work out well too often), but wherever, if it’s well-timed and the audience doesn’t see it coming, it can be much, much more effective than any amount of gore or screaming figures out of nowhere.
The blurb for Devil’s Gate isn’t bad, as that sort of thing goes - “Seeking a missing woman in North Dakota, an FBI agent and a sheriff focus on her religious zealot husband but discover something far more sinister” - and it by no means gives away the entire story, but it would have benefitted from even more understatement. Along with, well, a lot of other things. It’s not really a horror film, though it begins like one, and not an especially subtle one at that. Actually, nothing about this film is especially subtle. There’s a little promise in the beginning, but it’s mostly squandered by the halfway mark.
It begins with an absolutely gorgeous shot of a rural plain broken only by a single two-lane road and the one car traveling it. As we pull closer to the car, we hear it playing some kind of corny butt-rock, the driver getting into it as he steps on the gas, indulging in the freedom of the open highway…
…until his battery dies. Crap. His phone won’t get a signal either. So he does what one does, getting his car onto the shoulder and heading for the nearest farm to try and call for a tow.
And, sure enough, the farm he walks up to looks like your basic stock creepy farmhouse out of any given deranged backwoods cannibal movie. Windchimes made from scrap metal and cutlery, the fences are all jagged, everything’s dilapidated and boarded up, and everything is wrapped in barbed wire. There’s a “No Trespassing” sign that gives the dude pause for a couple of seconds before he unhitches the gate and walks through anyway. He knocks on the door, nothing. He shouts that his car broke down and he’d just like to use the phone, nothing. He walks around the side of the house, spots a figure through a basement window, ranting at something just out of sight. Apparently, this is the sign that maybe he shouldn’t be here. But it’s too late, as he discovers the hard (sharp, rusty, pointy, fatal) way that the yard is littered with improvised booby traps.
This stranded motorist has no relevance to the rest of the film. He’s just there to set up the idea that sinister things are afoot here, but, like, you can tell that just by looking at the place. The real story begins with Special Agent Daria Francis flying into Devil’s Gate, North Dakota. She’s there in response to a missing-persons report - a woman and her son were supposed to come stay with her sister and never arrived. She’s met by sheriff’s deputy Conrad Salter. He’s friendly and accommodating, she’s kind of uptight. The rude, dismissive sheriff doesn’t help any, nor does his insistence that she stay away from the most likely suspect.
So what we would appear to have is a standard fish-out-of-water story: A federal agent called in where they aren’t wanted to investigate a mysterious disappearance that local law enforcement isn’t too keen to solve for reasons not readily apparent. Agent Francis is no-nonsense and sort of uptight, as you would expect, but also relatively inexperienced and still stinging from botching her first missing-persons assignment, which is sort of an interesting fillip. Deputy Salter is very much your standard small-town deputy - helpful, but as firmly embedded in the community as everyone else. But he’s also smart, thorough, and competent at his job. Going to high school with their prime suspect doesn’t compromise his instincts, and he can take care of himself. So yeah, they’re what this kind of story dictates they’re going to be, but that’s not all there is to them. There’s some nuance there, some surprise. In a different movie, these little character beats might matter, might help elevate the film above cliché.
Here, not so much. See, one of the big problems with this film is that we’re sort of told up front that not all is as it appears to be - like, literally, it’s in the blurb for the movie - and that’s immediately clear because the initial setup is painted in such broad strokes that the viewer knows there has to be something else going on. Their prime suspect, Jackson Pritchard, is the husband to the missing woman, father to the missing child. He’s fervently religious, like his father before him. He’s also the owner of the farm from the beginning, the one ranting in the basement, the one burying the body of the hapless motorist. He’s too unstable to be the real antagonist here, if that makes sense. His farm shouts “creepy farm where there are sinister things happening” way too loudly (and, to the movie’s credit, Francis and Salter actually point out how creepy the place looks, which was a nice touch) for it to really be anything but misdirection.
Which is kind of a problem, from my perspective - I think stories where an outsider comes into a community to investigate a crime and discovers something far worse going on underneath benefit from the pretext for the investigation being something relatively routine, and then escalating things gradually as information doesn’t add up, and as it becomes clear that things are being covered up, and in a small community, there’s always the possibility that a lot of people are in on it, and so the outsider doesn’t know who to trust and can’t feel completely safe. We get a little of that here, but again, it’s not subtle at all when you have a sheriff who flat-out tells the outsider not to investigate the prime suspect. It’s not subtle at all when that prime suspect is overtly creepy and very definitely doing creepy things in a story that we’ve already been told isn’t what it appears to be. There’s no real opportunity for tension or surprise to develop when everything is so clearly signposted or, at least, not when it’s this clearly signposted and then not subverted at all. There’s no uncertainty or mystery to it.
But that’s just how it all starts. Like, that’s just the first act. At around the halfway point, the twist (that we know is coming, because we’ve been told up front that there’s something else going on) gets revealed, and whatever potential there was in the first half of the film gets chucked out the window in favor of a muddled siege film where our protagonists decide to stop being the people they were in the first half of the film and instead be the complete opposite, the real threat is revealed as something that isn’t actually all that scary, and the whole thing sort of devolves into a lesser episode of The X-Files with some questionable cruelty to helpless creatures and desiccated fetuses thrown in to distinguish it from the kind of stuff you’d see on cable TV. The dialogue, already very much on the speechier side, starts spilling over into exposition dumps and even though the majority of the second half is confined to a single location, there’s very little sense of urgency or claustrophobia or even really danger, just a lot of yelling and running around. And so it just sort of drags, people telling us things and then running off someplace, and this happening over and over and it’s just really hard to care about any of it, and then it ends pretty much exactly how you’d expect. For a film that is ostensibly about how not everything is as it seems, a film that at least tries to push back a little against cliché in some (though certainly not all) of its characterization, once it gets rolling it manages to make every obvious, expected, anticipated choice that it can. There’s no horror here, because horror requires tension and a certain amount of uncertainty. This film pretty much tells you everything that’s happening as it’s happening and doesn’t really try to surprise us. It’s like the filmmakers didn’t stop to think that this is a story we’ve heard before, and could they maybe use our preconceptions against us? Nah.
It’s too bad - it might not have gotten off to an especially strong start, and the tone was a little disjointed at first, but our two protagonists at least seemed like they weren’t going to collapse into cliché right away. The budget was certainly well-spent, with lots of moody panoramic shots of plains country stretching on forever, storm clouds hanging low, and surprisingly solid creature effects, but a film can be as good-looking as it wants, but if there’s nothing to surprise, no mystery, nothing unexpected, it doesn’t matter. And when this film needed to surprise us, it didn’t, and when it needed to defy cliché, it didn’t, and what we’re left with feels like something we’ve seen dozens of times before. If you’re going to tell us everything isn’t as it seems, then it…shouldn’t be exactly as it seems.
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