The House of the Devil

Set in the 1980s, The House of the Devil follows broke college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) as she agrees to spend the night working as a babysitter for a creepy couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) – with her evening inevitably progressing from dull to deadly. Filmmaker Ti West has infused The House of the Devil with an impressively retro feel that’s reflected in everything from its visuals to its deliberate pace to its reliance on old-school special effects, with the atmospheric ambiance initially going a long way towards compensating for the film’s less-than-enthralling storyline. And though West effectively peppers the proceedings with a number of suspenseful stand-alone interludes – eg Samantha dances around the enormous house while listening to music on her headphones – there’s simply never a point at which the almost distractingly uneventful narrative becomes as compelling as one might’ve hoped. West’s decision to emphasize Samantha’s time-killing exploits within the isolated mansion ultimately renders the movie’s creepy attributes moot, which is a shame, really, given the strength of Eliot Rockett’s sinister cinematography and Donahue’s charismatic (yet sporadically self-conscious) performance. One’s willingness to indulge West during film’s egregiously languid midsection is essentially predicated on the effectiveness of the finale, yet once it becomes clear that the third act – as well as the frustratingly vague conclusion – is as ineffective as everything that preceded it, The House of the Devil has doubtlessly cemented its place as a disappointingly underwhelming horror effort.

** out of ****