The “one-shot” film, similar to Sam Mendes’s war film 1917, has moved from a subgenre of horror that rings of a “discovery’ for some. Refined from the days of the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises, plus many Giallo examples, you have Adam O’Brien’s Bury the Devil enter the fray with an effort that is grounded. It is a film that positions itself at the intersection of Evil Dead and Mom, blurring the lines between a thriller and a supernatural descent into madness.
The work opens with a nocturnal shot of an old lakefront house engulfed in CGI flames, punctuated by a “75 minutes earlier” on-screen title. Segue to Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez), a live-in nurse seeking a fresh start that one learns later after the death of her mother and a demanding father. Her new placement is Evelyn (Dawn Ford), a woman suffering from advanced dementia whose mental state is a shifting tectonic plate of vulnerability, nostalgic sweetness, and sudden, “sly malice.”
The house is a sprawling, multi-level wood-paneled labyrinth that cinematographer Benoit Bealieu navigates through the story. Unlike some single-take films, Bury the Devil feels remarkably smooth. The camera floats through wood-paneled hallways and down creaking staircases like a spirit or a third person running around filming an event on a phone. Evelyn’s estranged husband Randall (Bill Rowat) arrives to rant about incantations in the middle of the night, only to return with a gang of middle-aged vigilantes and a priest.
Bury the Devil links demonic possession with the symptoms of dementia, similar to The Taking of Deborah Logan, which explored this earlier. Dawn Ford delivers a strong, vulnerable performance, transitioning from a confused, soft-spoken elderly woman to an entity without the aid of CGI, chiefly on facial and voice inflections. It is a metaphor for the loss of self that age and disease can do to one person. Playing against this in what is essentially a “two-hander, ” Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez as Julia provides the compassion and sympathy with the right amount of ‘ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances’ resolution.
Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez) faces off with an injured Randall (Bill Rowat) in a tense nighttime scene from Bury the Devil.
“Segue to Julia, a live-in nurse seeking a fresh start that one learns later after the death of her mother and a demanding father.”
As the film progresses into a full-scale ritualistic standoff. O’Brien utilizes “spinning camera” sequences during the height of the possession, while the film occasionally relies on tropes of a creepy cassette player, an ivory statue, and the basement of revelation as opposed to an Attic. These, plus the fluid camera, make it look like a video game that seems to be influencing how filmmakers package stories like this for their audience.
The script, co-written by Brad Hodson and Philip Kalin-Hajdu, is its strength: its pacing of a mere 86 minutes again draws one to compare this to the video game audience. Again, not jump scares all the time, which is what many are conditioned to, but this constant stillness with some odd sound is easier to do with no budget in other examples; it is simply lazy.
Bury the Devil can’t help but look like a combination of found footage with game movement. It repackages a story with some compelling character work and an ensemble cast in a new way, with some technical moments and some genuine scares, like a sequence with Evelyn in silhouette down a hall, saying lines in a meek voice. It serves as an evolution of O’Brien’s previous work, Mom, with the groundwork for a trilogy just like your next version of Resident Evil.
"…Bury the Devil links demonic possession with the symptoms of dementia..."
