Mark Reviews Movies: DEVIL'S WORKSHOP

Devil's Workshop, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2022

To its benefit, Devil's Workshop doesn't begin as a horror tale. Indeed, the suggestion of something supernatural and horrifying is presented as a bit of a joke. The other part of that joke is an actor—unsuccessful, insecure, slightly narcissistic, jealous, desperate to prove everyone who has ignored or doubted him wrong. Some people will do just about anything to get what they want, and if that means participating in some kind of blood ritual with a complete stranger, so be it.

In other words, writer/director Chris von Hoffman's movie begins as a comedy, and it's a pretty funny one. Von Hoffman's screenplay is in-the-know about show business generally, as well as the actor's life specifically, and clever in the way it gradually builds a winking, poking attitude about the lengths to which its main character is willing to go in order to see his dreams come true. The payoff, of course, turns out to be pretty predictable, but that might be the least of the problems with how all of this finally turns.

That struggling actor is named Clayton (Timothy Granaderos), and the story begins with him auditioning for the juicy role of a demonologist with plenty of figurative demons in his past. There's an amusing bit of bait-and-switch, then, right from the start, as Clayton recites a monologue from that character's perspective, only for us to realize how mundane the setup to this guy's story actually is. Clayton apparently nails that first audition, because his agent later lets him know about a callback in a few days.

This could finally be his big break, and von Hoffman has a lot of knowing fun taking us through just how demoralizing Clayton's career has been up to this point. He recently did a TV gig, but his father and aunt call with confused and half-hearted congratulations. His scene in the show was cut, apparently.

Right now, he's little more than a constant acting student, in a class with the more successful Donald (Emile Hirsch, clearly having a blast), an absolute jerk and egomaniac who pretends not to be that way but whose off-putting personality is too strong to hide it. Even the class' teacher has to play nice and more or else plead for Donald, who started his acting career as a toddler in a commercial and has since moved on to social media, to help him arrange an audition. The resulting exchange, in which Donald lets the instructor down "easy" with a barrage of not-so-hidden insults, feels a bit too uncomfortably authentic about that character and the dynamics of relative fame.

As for Clayton, he knows he'll be competing against Donald for the demonologist role, so he wants to really ace the forthcoming second audition. For that, he puts out an ad online, looking to talk to someone with that kind of real-world experience, and sure enough, he gets a phone call from such an expert.

She's Eliza (Radha Mitchell), an expert in demons who offers to help. She invites Clayton to stay at her remote, out-of-the-way house for a couple nights so that she can teach the actor everything she knows about the job he'll be pretending to have for the job that could be his big break.

For a while, much of this works as comedy and in terms of ratcheting the unease of what Eliza might actually have in store for Clayton. A lot of that comes from Mitchell, who's equal parts mysterious, alluring, sincere, and maybe a hint sinister in her performance, but Granaderos holds his own, too, making Clayton both sympathetic and plain pathetic as the actor with just enough heartbreak to justify his despair and just enough despair to explain why he'd go through with a lot of increasingly odd requests and acts. As a juxtaposition to Clayton's severe preparation, von Hoffman intercuts those scenes with ones involving Donald, who decides the best way to get ready to play an expert in the supernatural is get drunk, hang out with a couple of younger women (played by Sarah Coffey and Brooke Ramirez), and torment one with his knowledge of how her parents died.

We keep waiting for these two stories to connect in some way, but they don't. The scenes with Hirsch's Donald seem more of a reminder that the story is meant to be humorous. That reminder becomes important as Clayton and Eliza embark on performing a ritual that she promises will remove all of his negative feelings about himself—from his failed acting career to the death of his mother, which he is convinced he caused. The idea of an insecure actor going to such lengths for the chance of success and an easy fix to his emotional issues is a good joke, and it's a shame that von Hoffman starts to take the whole thing a bit too seriously.

That choice is particularly unfortunate as it becomes clear the story and the filmmaker aren't prepared to dig into the character and his problems on a sincere level. Again, the finale of Devil's Workshop—the big punch line to material that eventually stops behaving like a joke—is a predictable one. After all of the potential of the setup, the cheap and rushed payoff does a final disservice to this previously promising material, which is good while it lasts but doesn't go the distance.

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