DEVILS STAY - Mark Reviews Movies

Devils Stay, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

There's a neat conceit to writer/director Hyun Moon-seop's Devils Stay, which begins with the exorcism of a pre-teen girl. Most horror movies about the subject would build to this moment, but Hyun's story gets it out of the way immediately. This one, as it turns out, is about the aftermath of the ritual.

The girl, named So-mi (Lee Re), dies as a result of the exorcism, leaving her family and the priest who performed the rite broken, in shock, and trying to understand how such a tragedy could happen. The idea of this story, unfortunately, is far more intriguing than Hyun's execution of it, which eventually just builds up to everybody going through the same process over again. The only distinction the second time is that the possessed body is dead.

This is a strange, roundabout way to simply do the usual and exactly what everyone would expect from such a tale. The movie promises something unusual or, at least, slightly different, so to watch it proceed to go through the routine, formulaic motions is disappointing.

It doesn't help that Hyun's screenplay is essentially giving us two formulaic exorcism stories playing next to each other, either. The first occurs by way of expositional dialogue and flashbacks, explaining how that priest, named Father Ban (Lee Min-ki), wound up in So-mi's bedroom, shouting prayers and demanding to learn the demon's name and attempting to cast the evil force out of the girl's body.

That plot, set in South Korea, is too convoluted and silly to really describe, so maybe it's for the best that Hyun's script saves most of those revelations for the third act. We don't have to discuss them here, although it's worth hinting at the ludicrous nature of it by pointing out the first possession involves Russian devil worshippers, agents of the Orthodox Church hunting down these occultists, and forcible organ extraction from a living person. If the movie weren't already juggling these details with the oddity of a demon occupying a dead body, they might have worked. The combination is overwhelmingly ridiculous.

In the aftermath of the failed exorcism, So-mi's father Seung-do (Park Shin-yang), a skilled heart surgeon, must confront the grief of losing a child and the guilt of feeling responsible for what happened to her. After all, he was also his daughter's doctor, treating her for a heart condition that required a transplant. Before the surgery, she was a happy, curious, and kind-hearted girl. Afterwards, her behavior became erratic and violent, which we see in brief flashes of her attacking a classmate at school and attempting to drown her mother (played by Woo Min-ji) in the bathtub.

The flashbacks don't amount to much, since Hyun is at least primarily focused on the strange occurrences surrounding the girl's corpse, so the screenplay isn't exactly repeating itself across its dual timelines. In spirit, the movie definitely is, but narratively, the flashbacks come across more as Hyun giving into the requirements of the genre than actually creating a fully-fledged secondary story.

As for the body, it starts making noises inside the cooler in the morgue where it's housed, shows darkened veins starting at the heart and showing through the skin, and pulls off some other neat tricks, too. At one point, it levitates, obviously, but the familiar sight becomes somewhat unique in Hyun's hands, as the girl's corpse floats in the middle of the street and higher still to the terrified reactions of a crowd of mourners. The filmmaker uses the Korean tradition that funerals take place in hospitals to convenient effect, too, especially when Seung-do decides to do some emergency resuscitation on his daughter's days-dead body, some other religious people show up for a memorial and are attacked by the demon, and the climax leads the father and the priest to the hospital's dark basement.

What takes place there? Does it need to be asked? It's yet another exorcism, of course, and for the initial attempt to subvert genre storytelling and the occasional flashes of inspiration in Hyun's horror scenes, the movie does boil down to a familiar routine.

The family can't figure out what's wrong with their child, apart from the obvious bit—that she's dead. The priest does some research into the nature and history of the demon he seems destined to confront, while also dealing with his own past failures (He has a terrible track record, it seems, with exorcisms, so it's a bit of surprise he's basically suspended from duty only after this catastrophe). More creepy things happen, and while the angle of grief seems like a compelling way to get to some humanity in this supernatural tale, it's more about trying to preserve a dead body, which doesn't quite match the stakes of trying to save a living person.

Devils Stay may begin with some key differences to the genre. Ultimately, though, it's just more of the same, old same-old with a twist on the setup that doesn't change much.

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