Reserved tension and an unexpected narrative help director Nicholas McCarthy’s sophomoric feature, At The Devil’s Door, remain engrossing until the final moments. McCarthy’s first film, the creepy and equally subtle The Pact, was a notable independent horror film that put a twist on the traditional haunted house story. McCarthy again takes a recognizable story and spins it into a contemporary piece using several genre characteristics and a continuously shifting plot, making At The Devil’s Door strange and confusing, but still effective.
Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a real estate agent tasked with selling a house with a suspicious past under mysterious circumstances. Vera (Naya Rivera), trying to build a better relationship with her sister Leigh, becomes involved in the dealings with the house. What the sisters don’t realize is the powerful supernatural presence within the house, an entity that wants to unite with humanity.
McCarthy, who also wrote the script, builds the mystery ingeniously. Instead of a straightforward approach, the narrative continuously changes emphasis of storytelling by taking three different perspectives to the unfolding events. It’s starts with a girl (Ashley Rickards) asked to play a grave game, then transitions into the supernatural investigation of a lost child, all this leading towards an encounter with the unknown. While none of it is particularly scary, aside from a couple of expected jump scares, the film succeeds in embodying a disorienting narrative atmosphere that cleverly clouds where the film is going in moments. While this works in keeping the mystery brewing, in some of the transitioning scenes when the film shifts between perspectives, the keenly levied tension is lost. Still, the unpredictability offers a nice attribute, one that is applied to draw the viewer into the film.
The film is pillared by three good female performances, each character crafted with mysterious qualities and defined individuality. The siblings in the story, Moreno and Rivera who are both vulnerable and determined, are given a complicated relationship with a past that is only partially explained. Their dialogue is heavy with tough emotions, but there is a caring sentiment within their arguments. Even in straightforward moments like with Ashley Rickards cryptic character, she offers a foundation for the supernatural elements in the story, which supplies her character with some of the more memorable creepy moments.
McCarthy effectively uses technical elements, like camera pushes that bring anxiousness to peaked moments and sound design elements that add to the subtle tension that defines At The Devil’s Door. It may not offer the adrenaline rush that some of the recent haunted films have produced, but the unexpected design will linger longer than you may anticipate.
Movie Score: 3.5 / 5
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