“The Devil Made Me Do It” Film Review

By Quinn Marcus

There’s a nice word I like to use often, not too complex, but at the same time, grammatically intriguing, mainly used to describe things I simply dislike… “no.” You see, it’s the use of the word “no” that automatically grasps the reader’s attention, makes them question the world around them. What if dogs are fake? What if the sun is an illusion? The possibilities are endless. The dictionary describes the word “no” as a phrase used to give a negative response, and…I’m bored. You may be wondering why I decided to open with such a tedious piece of writing, well, at first I thought I was writing something quirky and unique, but realized I was in fact explaining my exact thoughts of the third Conjuring installment, only, not quite in the typical way. Let’s just say, if I wasn’t at a friend’s house, laughing my ass off, I would have fallen asleep within minutes of beginning this monstrosity of a film.

The Devil Made Me Do It once again tells the story of real-life paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren, as they try to solve the infamous case that brought the devil into the courtroom. Oh my god, I can’t take writing about this plot seriously, let’s just wrap it up by saying: bad shit happens, alright, that’s about all you need to know.

I highly enjoyed the first two films, especially part one, they both had me sleeping with the lights on, and the first even got me to sleep in my parent’s bedroom. Sure, it could get ridiculous at times, and the second film did feel pretty familiar, but they were both thoroughly entertaining. Certain shots were burned into my mind, and while there were jump scares, they were crafted with bone-chilling work from James Wan. Michael Chaves is obviously not nearly as skilled, often resorting to generic horror tropes for shock value. A few scares made me jump a little bit, but once you figure out that every single scare involves a hand scraping something, or some gimmick used in every horror film, the tension quickly goes away. The biggest mistake of the film was deciding to surround the film’s plot around a murder case rather than a haunting. The difference is that while the first two films exaggerated the true story, it was terrifying to think that something similar happened. However, when you take a story about someone who pled not guilty because they were “possessed by a demon,” that doesn’t leave a whole lot of opportunity to get creative.

There were a couple of cool sequences, particularly one in the forest, but besides the once again fantastic Patrick Wilson/Vera Farmiga, there wasn’t much to keep me engaged. The story felt extremely formulaic and simplistic: shocking realization, scare and finding something useful or satanic on repeat. The moment I heard that a Conjuring film was going to be a courtroom drama, I legitimately couldn’t stop laughing, in my opinion, it wasn’t the right way to go. If you want to make a film about a certain topic, stick to it, don’t go all over the place, don’t make your characters continuously run into dark corners only to be scared by some dead fat guy from the Morgue. One thing that also struck me as a surprise was how bland the cinematography was, a lot of it looked really plain and uninteresting, whereas the previous films produced haunting and engaging imagery. There were even a handful of shots I’d go as far as to call fake, nothing looked natural, there was a clear dependency on gore for shock-value, but even the disgusting parts of the film were visually hilarious.

The villain of the film, this devil worshipper, had some of the corniest dialogue I’ve ever seen. There’s a scene in the film when Farmiga’s character has a vision of where this satanist does her rituals or whatever, and the satanist turns to Farmiga and says in the most ridiculous voice: “how are you doing this.” There was honestly nothing menacing about the villain of the story, what made the villains in the previous films so great was that we didn’t quite know what our heroes were up against, James Wan kept us asking what our detectives could be facing, leading up to a horrifying reveal by the finish. These far more frightening villains made me feel as if they knew every move our protagonists were going to make, doubling the intensity. Chaves almost immediately tells us who our villain is, what she does, what her goal is, another mistake ultimately sacrificing any tension the film could have had. The final thing I want to discuss was how unbelievably boring the film turned out to be, two of my friends literally dozed off during the second half, and honestly, I wish I had too. The Devil Made Me Do It features some of the most repetitive, contrived, and downright confused storytelling I’ve seen from a horror film, the script had no idea what it wanted to be. To summarize: another large issue this film has is the lack of a consistent plotline. The main story was often strayed from, making it less and less interesting, and in the end, it all just collapsed into one giant mess.