Shooting any film with the appearance of one continuous shot is a very tough needle to thread, but I think it’s especially tricky in the horror world. When it works, the immediacy of it, the sense that you’re so close to the terror you can almost touch it, can drop your jaw. When it doesn’t, the constantly moving camera saps the tension right out of the air, deflating whatever narrative driver the film might have had.
Bury the Devil from director/producer Adam O’Brien is the latest horror film to attempt this gambit, and it mostly pays off. Brimming with stylistic flourishes that help to overcome an uneven and sometimes rote script, this is one-take horror that holds its tension and its scares over the course of one horrifying night.
The film unfolds almost entirely in real time, beginning with a hellish opening shot and then flashing back to “75 minutes earlier” inside an isolated lake house. Here we meet Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez), a home health worker who’s just taken a job caring for dementia patient Evelyn (Dawn Ford). It’s a normal gig at first, as Julia reminisces with Evelyn about her daughter, tucks her into bed, and then sets out to get the house in order. When Evelyn wanders back out of bed and asks why a strange woman is in her house, it’s still just part of the job, and Julia’s composure is relatively unshaken by the big empty house with its many little candles and cavernous old rooms.
But soon Evelyn’s nighttime wanderings will take on a more sinister tone. Something is wrong in this house, and if Julia’s going to survive the night, she has to find out what really happened to Evelyn’s daughter.
This premise pays immediate dividends, helped along by O’Brien’s firm grasp on his one-take, real-time concept. Cinematographer Benoit Beaulieu lights the house in wonderfully atmospheric ways, creating just enough darkness to get us anxious and leave us searching the shadows for clues without ever rendering the film murky or difficult to watch. Of course, the usual motion sickness caution applies with a film like this, but Beaulieu and O’Brien have clearly risen to meet this technical challenge, crafting a film with flavors of The House of the Devil and Relic even as it sets out on its own path.
As the title suggests, this is a demonic horror movie, and the emotional arc it brings within the confines of that subgenre is, if not surprising, then at least clearly stated and consistent. As an elderly woman with dementia, Evelyn can often seem like she’s not herself, and the way she blips in and out of her own reality, her mind trying to sort through a tangle of memories and confusion and static, weighs on Julia, twisting her reality until the whole house feels like a kind of pocket universe of evil.
The production design helps with this, blending touches of the Gothic with the kind of classic wood-paneled lake house vibe so many of us recognize, but the camera is also key. As it follows Julia from room to room, sometimes catching a glimpse of Evelyn in a darkened hallway or lingering somewhere unexpected, you get the sense that another presence is there, another character with their own desires beyond simply watching what unfolds. The tension is steel drum tight, and it works, at least until the narrative grows a bit more complicated.
Credit where it’s due: The film’s script, credited to Brad Hodson and John Petrizzi, has a very clear arc running throughout. They keep the primary narrative thrust clear, they pay off what they set up, and they throw in lots of demonic mayhem along the way. Where the film started to lose me, even if it was only temporary, was in the sometimes stale depiction of the demonic and what it means not just for Evelyn, but for those in her life who seem to slowly realize what she’s becoming.
Characters speak like real people, and feel like real people, in one scene, then morph into archetypes the next, losing some of the film’s momentum for the sake of laying out lore that might be better left a tad more ambiguous. The main narrative is only 75 minutes long (the entire film is only about 10 minutes longer than that, with credits), so time is a precious commodity, but at times the film dispenses with elegant solutions to its narrative problems and simply bludgeons the audience with exposition.
Clues to its supernatural mysteries appear a little too easily, and arrive in predictable ways. Even the camera occasionally gets caught up in something overly formulaic, taking the idea that it can simply spin around characters as they talk to dizzying (literally) extremes. The effort to maintain visual dynamism and narrative efficiency is admirable, but it doesn’t always pay off.
Fortunately, the chamber piece nature of the story allows plenty of room for the performances to carry things through, and it’s here that Martinez and Ford shine. Ford, a character actor with a long string of high-profile voice acting roles to her name, dives into the various shades of Evelyn with frenzied enthusiasm, while Martinez plays a woman with secrets of her own, slowly unraveling under the weight of fresh revelations and dangers. Together they make a remarkable duo, and you almost wish the film was just slightly longer to allow for a little more character work.
One-take horror is always a gamble, but for Bury the Devil, it pays off more than it doesn’t. The story’s not quite all the way there, and the camera work sometimes devolves into the needlessly frenetic, but this is still a remarkably tense, brutal piece of work that goes for the throat and, despite loosening its grip now and then, never lets go.
Bury the Devil is in select theaters and on VOD August 21.
