TL;DR: Bury the Devil is a short, creepy possession movie that features some strong sound design, and while the story itself isn't exactly breaking new ground, the performances, atmosphere, and final stretch make it worth a look if you like slow-burn horror that eventually loses its manners.
Bury the Devil Knows How to Make a House Feel Wrong
I loved the house setting in Bury the Devil, because this place feels old, isolated, and full of corners where you really don't want to look too closely, and feels like a perfect setting for a horror film, with the storm outside making everything feel that much worse.
Adam O'Brien directs the film, with Benoit Beaulieu handling the cinematography, and they clearly understand that a horror house doesn't need to be covered in cobwebs and blood to make you uncomfortable, as sometimes, all you need is an old room, poor lighting, and something moving in the distance - the film also makes good use of the windows and the architecture, featuring some shots where Julia and Evelyn are framed against parts of the house that almost seem to trap them inside the picture.
Bury the Devil is also presented as one continuous take, which is a pretty ambitious way to make an 80-minute horror movie, and because the camera keeps moving with Julia, you never get the comfortable feeling that a normal cut would give- there's no convenient jump to another room while she is dealing with something horrible, as we stay with her, move through the house with her, and spend enough time looking around that you start wondering what might be lurking just outside the frame, which is a good feeling to have.
The downside is that the movie occasionally gets too interested in showing off the camera movement, where there are moments where the camera squeezes through places and performs tricks that makes you think more about the filmmaking than the horror itself, and there are also hidden cuts, with some being cleverly concealed, while others are easier to spot, particularly when the camera does things that would be physically impossible without one.
The Sound Is Doing a Lot of the Scaring
The sound design deserves a lot of credit here too - thunder rolls through the house, rain and wind press against the windows, and the old building makes all sorts of little sounds, and then there are the footsteps.
Those footsteps become increasingly disturbing because the movie doesn't immediately tell you where they're coming from, as they start small, almost easy to dismiss, and eventually become something much harder to ignore., and that is exactly the kind of horror I prefer.
There are still some traditional jump scares though if you like that sort of thing,
Dawn Ford Makes Evelyn Uncomfortable to Watch
Dawn Ford gives Evelyn a strong performance here, particularly because she doesn't play her as a straightforward horror character from the beginning - Evelyn is an elderly woman dealing with dementia, and the film uses her confusion carefully, where her behavior can initially be understood through her condition, which makes it harder for Julia, and for the audience, to know what is actually happening, which is a smart choice.
Ford also gets considerably more physical as the film progresses, so when Evelyn's condition takes a supernatural turn, she isn't simply standing in a corner with creepy eyes - she crawls, moves awkwardly, changes her voice, and generally becomes a much more frightening presence, and some of those scenes are pretty decent
Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez also does a good job as Julia,where she feels like a carer rather than someone secretly waiting for her horror movie moment, and there is something much more stressful about watching someone who genuinely doesn't know what to do, because if Julia had spent the movie calmly investigating every strange noise, I would probably have wanted to reach through the screen and tell her to stop being ridiculous.
The performance also gives the movie a useful emotional center because so much of the story is experienced through Julia's reactions.
Its Final Stretch
The first part of Bury the Devil is deliberately restrained, as it spends a lot of time establishing the house, Evelyn, Julia, and the strange situation surrounding them, before the movie starts pulling in Randall, Evelyn's ex-husband, played by Bill Rowat, along with a priest played by Mark Antony Krupa and a henchman played by Jason Cavalier.
This part of the story is where I think the film becomes a little less convincing, as some of these characters feel like they exist mainly to push the story toward its final act, but it would have been nice to have some more information about them, especially Randall, because there's clearly more going on around Evelyn than Julia initially understands, but the short runtime probably explains some of that.
The final section though is where the movie really starts throwing things around - the violence increases, the supernatural elements become much more obvious, and the story gets considerably more intense, so after spending so much time creeping around the house, the film finally stops being polite about what is happening.
Possession movies have of course been around forever, and Bury the Devil knows this, and its main way of giving the material some personality is through the way the movie is filmed, rather than bringing much new to the table, but I did like where the movie eventually takes things.
The opening image of the burning house gives the entire film a destination, but the ending still manages to add a few surprises along the way, and more importantly, the ending feels like it belongs to this movie.
It's strange, grim, and suitably unpleasant.
Final Thoughts
Bury the Devil is short, it knows how to build tension, and when it finally goes completely off the rails, it earns the right to do so, but I think it could have done being a little bit longer too, but a decent enough watch for me.
Trailer
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