Samantha is a young university student desperately looking for a job to pay for the first few months of rent for her new home where she is about to move. She offers herself as a babysitter in response to an ad she found on the notice board in front of her university. As the sun sets, Samantha goes to the workplace where she is immediately greeted by the homeowner, Mr. Ulman. The man, after having her settle in the house, reveals that in reality there is no child to take care of and the ad was placed to find someone willing to supervise his wife's elderly mother for a few hours. After an initial hesitation that pushes Mr. Ulman to significantly increase the pay, Samantha accepts the job. Everything goes smoothly; the house is silent, and Samantha seems to have no complications with the elderly woman. Meanwhile, all radio and television programs do nothing but talk about the total lunar eclipse that is about to occur that very night.
A quick glance at horror cinema of recent years is enough to understand that revival films are no longer news, and what's out of fashion is becoming fashionable. With increasing frequency, we can come across works by young filmmakers who bring back themes and languages dear to a cinema from a few decades ago, creating "nostalgic" operations useful for making older viewers travel back in time with their memories. But these "nostalgia operations" have become so frequent and insistent lately that it would almost be necessary to put a brake on them and start remembering the present instead of the past.
Accomplices of this continuous return to the "once upon a time..." are undoubtedly the Tarantino-Rodriguez duo, who with the interesting "Grindhouse" operation have encouraged hordes of young filmmakers to make films useful for paying homage, in some way, to the old films with which they were weaned and then grew up. After Tarantino's "Death Proof" and Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," the big screen (or the small one, depending on the case) has begun to be invaded by this type of productions, sometimes coming up with nice and tasty things and sometimes really borderline stuff. Starting with the duo Rodriguez&Maniquis' "Machete," one can cite lighthearted nonsense like "Zombie Strippers," "Nude Nuns With Big Guns," "Bitch Slap – The Overdotted," "Hobo With a Shotgun" up to different operations, devoid of this crazed spirit but still moved by citationist intentions, such as the French "Amer" by H. Cattet and B. Forzani or the German "Masks" by A. Marshall.
"The House of the Devil," in the end, is just another title added to the long list of revival products. Yet there is something that sets it apart from the aforementioned films, not so much in terms of quality but conceptually. In the director's chair, we find Ti West, a young director who seems to be inspired by a certain past horror cinema more out of vocation than to follow a simple trend of the moment. Even with his feature film debut, "The Roost – The Den," West had hinted at the entire grammar of his cinema, creating a product that, although of poor quality, stood as a genuine (and partly successful) homage to all those B-movies of the eighties. The interesting thing is that "The Roost," as the case may be, is a film dated 2005 and thus arrived two years before the Grindhouse craze exploded. Therefore, young Ti West is simply continuing on his path, adding pieces to his project, without clinging to any trend.
Although set in the 1980s, "The House of the Devil" immediately shows itself (just look at the opening credits) as a sincere homage to the horror cinema of the 1970s, and more than limiting itself to an ephemeral citationist game, West's film seeks to adopt the very language, narration, and atmosphere typical of that decade. The operation can be said to be definitely successful, and watching "The House of the Devil" really feels like being in front of an old film from the seventies. The experiment has therefore been successfully completed, it's a shame that the discussion is destined to change when we go to evaluate "The House of the Devil" only and solely as a film. In this case, unfortunately, the film is convincing only halfway, leaving the viewer with an annoying sense of emptiness and incompleteness.
The film is like a fake firework, one of those with a very long fuse but incapable of making that deafening bang that everyone rightly expects. The film in question does nothing but create anticipation; it enjoys a minimalist but richly nuanced narration that makes the viewer expect a great finale capable of redeeming that unhealthy sense of stasis and quiet that pervades the entire film. However, the expectation is betrayed, and when the situation starts to take off (more or less around the hour and a quarter mark), very little happens. No twist, nothing that wasn't already expected from the caption that opens the film; the final turn is so predictable, and the climax is certainly too brief (in stark disproportion to the anticipation). In short, the long fuse has run out; the bang has occurred, but it wasn't necessary to cover your ears to preserve your hearing.
On the acting side, nothing to say. Very convincing is the performance of the lead actress Jocelin Donahue, the babysitter Samantha, the only actress for most of the runtime and capable of holding the scene without too many difficulties. Always in form is Tom Noonan ("Manhunter – Frammenti di un omicidio," "Last Action Hero") here in the role of the not very reassuring Mr. Ulman, and it is also worth noting the always welcome presence of Dee Wallace ("The Howling") in a small cameo at the beginning of the film.
In short, "The House of the Devil" is a film that convinces halfway: an experiment certainly well succeeded as the packaging is typical of the 1970s, but penalized by an unbalanced narration incapable of offering that impactful finale that the long wait had made crave.
Curiosity: Only a year earlier, in 2008, the interesting film "Babysitter Wanted" was made by directors Jonas Barnes and Michael Manasseri, which, all in all, presents more than a few similarities with Ti West's film. Will it just be a coincidence?
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